It's right that the rhythms of Real Life dictate those of our Second Lives. Though there's a temptation to do it the other way around, I'm sure it's not quite healthy. Maybe it's only the same as cutting short a night out to make a phone call. But the immersive magic of SL means is doesn't compare very well to other forms of communication. You need to make time for it and it rewards you, but that time has to fit in around the demands of life itself. I think of SL and my friends there a lot when I'm not online. It made me think that the best way to make a film about Second Life would actually be not to shoot much in SL at all. Just a person in RL with a foot in another world.
Part conference call, part opium dream, SL doesn't fit neatly into a category.
Why am I thinking like this? I moved house in RL and that meant not just three days without contact with friends who I usually see almost every day, but three days without any internet access, and another three weeks before it's working at home - except if I contort myself and my laptop in one corner of one room and pray for the gods of unsecured networks to smile on me. Which they tend to :))
Monday 28 May 2007
Wednesday 23 May 2007
Playing with a new effect
OK 12 hours and then some in the edit suite today... surely I could find a few minutes of render time for a new effect! Oh yes.
It might be in the video bar.... somewhere here >
But the quality is messed up... try this: http://deviantmedia.co.uk/altern8.mp4
Tuesday 22 May 2007
Tea and biscuits at nephie's place
Neph is the perfect housewife, she loves her little cottage with the white fence, roses around the door... and she is so fussy about tablecloths.... oh sorry... did I get the wrong Neph. This one is cool.
Monday 21 May 2007
Once more, with feeling...
It was a ridiculous sight - the generic avatars jumping on each other using crude animations approximating sex.
"Hahaha! It looks so stupid! I could never be jealous if my husband was doing this!" Said the woman sitting next to me.
She was director I was working with on a short SL movie. She was new to virtual worlds and this is as far as many people get.
Part of the movie meant our hero (who we see in Real Life and in SL) meets a girl avatar (we never see her in RL) in second life and falls for her. They had met already in SL a few times before shooting began and got on quite well. I know he was intrigued about who she really was.
We laughed about the embrace between them between that would come at the end of our film.
But when it came to it and they embraced, a weird thing happened, the guy in RL sitting at a laptop across from me, really felt something, it was obvious. I was fliming it in SL of course, and it was an uncomfortable moment.
I wasn't sure what to expect when these two people touched virtually. But it proved to me that this is something that others can feel too.
I have been really shaken by how much we can feel through this medium. I have felt the touch on my skin of fingers a thousand kilometres away, I've had the oddest synchronisations. The kind that happen rarely in RL seem more frequent here. I can't explain that. Except that it means something.
This wasn't what I was expecting from a world coded in cold ones and zeroes, from the concept, it didn't seem like a place where the human spirit should, or could, flourish.
But I came and explored and I have stayed. I've seen such incredible creativity here and felt the love of people who share only imagination and a vision. It's not for everyon and maybe even most of the residents don't fully realise the impact of this technology on humans.
I think it's about play in it's purest form. It's making mud pies in the garden. It's dressing up. It's making camps. It's exploring. It's lego. It's for grownups who won't let go of the eyes and imagination of their childhood.
In SL there's no goal, so there's a vacuum and the most amazing stuff pops out of people to fill it.
According to Marshall McLuhan - the visionary who came up with the term "global village" - we should look at technologies that extend us and ask, what do they extend? The telephone extends our voice, TV extends our vision... what do virtual worlds extend, I wonder? The self? (is there such a thing?) I know it's some big part of us. I feel it.
He also says we should not forget that when something is extended, something else is lost. From my experience, it's time. Not lost perhaps, but converted from potential to memories. I have some very precious ones from Second Life, from laughing so much that my stomach hurts and exploring this new world with some of the funniest, smartest and most thoughtful people I've never met.
"Hahaha! It looks so stupid! I could never be jealous if my husband was doing this!" Said the woman sitting next to me.
She was director I was working with on a short SL movie. She was new to virtual worlds and this is as far as many people get.
Part of the movie meant our hero (who we see in Real Life and in SL) meets a girl avatar (we never see her in RL) in second life and falls for her. They had met already in SL a few times before shooting began and got on quite well. I know he was intrigued about who she really was.
We laughed about the embrace between them between that would come at the end of our film.
But when it came to it and they embraced, a weird thing happened, the guy in RL sitting at a laptop across from me, really felt something, it was obvious. I was fliming it in SL of course, and it was an uncomfortable moment.
I wasn't sure what to expect when these two people touched virtually. But it proved to me that this is something that others can feel too.
I have been really shaken by how much we can feel through this medium. I have felt the touch on my skin of fingers a thousand kilometres away, I've had the oddest synchronisations. The kind that happen rarely in RL seem more frequent here. I can't explain that. Except that it means something.
This wasn't what I was expecting from a world coded in cold ones and zeroes, from the concept, it didn't seem like a place where the human spirit should, or could, flourish.
But I came and explored and I have stayed. I've seen such incredible creativity here and felt the love of people who share only imagination and a vision. It's not for everyon and maybe even most of the residents don't fully realise the impact of this technology on humans.
I think it's about play in it's purest form. It's making mud pies in the garden. It's dressing up. It's making camps. It's exploring. It's lego. It's for grownups who won't let go of the eyes and imagination of their childhood.
In SL there's no goal, so there's a vacuum and the most amazing stuff pops out of people to fill it.
According to Marshall McLuhan - the visionary who came up with the term "global village" - we should look at technologies that extend us and ask, what do they extend? The telephone extends our voice, TV extends our vision... what do virtual worlds extend, I wonder? The self? (is there such a thing?) I know it's some big part of us. I feel it.
He also says we should not forget that when something is extended, something else is lost. From my experience, it's time. Not lost perhaps, but converted from potential to memories. I have some very precious ones from Second Life, from laughing so much that my stomach hurts and exploring this new world with some of the funniest, smartest and most thoughtful people I've never met.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)