Pixie Rain: straddling Art and Porn in Second Life.
Some of the machinima and blog-posts on this site are adult in nature and contain scenes that some people may find disturbing.
If you feel this might be you, please exit now.
Other elements are warm and cuddly and have a "feel good" factor.
Click the "Film Link" tab below for all my films listed chronologically.
If you get the chance, I’d especially
recommend watching Miron Locket’s ‘Unfinished
Paintings’. This is a great, fun high-tone production made in iClone by a
clearly extremely talented guy, musically and visually. Unfortunately I haven’t
been able to locate the film on the net to embed here, but when I do I will.
Hypatia Pickens’ ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ is based on an Old
English poem and has a great rhythm and beat. Definitely worth watching.
‘The Chapelside Deception’ by IceAxe is a more conventional narrative
film consisting of “a beginning, middle and end”. Created using MovieStorm, it
tells the story of corruption in a soccer team during the 1970s.
As part of the Expo, Tutsy
was asked to produce a video interview based on questions supplied by Ricky
Grove. I provided the translation from French to English.
For the first time, we can now
release that interview publically.
‘MetaSex’ and ‘The Last Syllable of Recorded Time’ by
Tutsy Navarathna have both been selected as MachinimaExpo 2012 Jury Nominated films!
They will go into competition against eight other films, with the results
announced in mid-November.
As mentioned before, what is interesting and significant about the
MachinimaExpo Jury Nominated competition is that film entries can come *from*
any digital platform, not just Second Life. This year sees five entries from
SL, three created using Moviestorm
and two using iClone.
Here is the list of nominees and links to the films (where I
have been able to find them).
-Libre Arbitre by Olivier Romme (France,
Moviestorm)
- Unfinished Paintings by Miron Lockett (US, iClone)
Over the next week I’ll get around to watching all ten films
and, although I wish each entrant the very best, it is admittedly somewhatdifficult for
me to be anything but biased.
And on that confessional note, let us yet again take the
time to immerse ourselves in the glorious light that is ‘MetaSex’ :
November sees the opening of this year’s MachinimaExpo. What is particularly significant
about the MachinimaExpo is that film entries come from many different games and
MMOGs, not just Second Life.
Of the hundreds of entries, a 5-person jury panel selects
just ten to go forward into competition against each other. The names of the ten
selected machinima will be released later this week.
Last year I attended the Expo and blogged the experience here. It was a really very enjoyable
evening. As I said at the time, the real eye-opener was realising just how much
great machinima is being created outside of SL. The ten nominated films last
year included, for example, entries created in Grand Theft Auto and Pro Evolution
Soccer. The eventual winner, Phil Browne’s adaptation of the HP Lovecraft's classic ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ was created
using iClone.
It would, of course, be remiss of me not to drop in here
that Tutsy’s ‘A Journey Into the Metaverse’ was
awarded second place.
If last year is anything to go by, the ten nominated films
will be of exceptional quality. Personally I would have been proud to have
created any one of the ten! We’ll know the ten soon, and I can’t wait to watch
them…
In the meantime, here is the official trailer for this year’s
MachinimaExpo:
Only a few short few weeks ago while discussing the historical,
philosophical and spiritual significance of Halloween I asked Tutsy, “Have you
ever heard the song, ‘Monster Mash’?”
“Nein, ma chérie une gousse de vanille mûre” he replied,
reverting to his native Language of Love, “Tell me more...”
Tutsy watches the video while I feed the Indian Internet
mice small pieces of Wensleydale and cranberry cheese.
“Mein gott!” he exclaims at the end, “A Masterpiece! I will make a movie of this for Halloween!”
“YES!”
“Merci, ma muse prune fraises dodues. I will start
immediately!”
He teleports off, spending the next week exploring for
locations, filming and editing…
And here it is...Please be upstanding for Tutsy Navarathna’s latest
machinima, ‘The Monster Mash’ (best
in HD quality, click ‘Change Quality’ button):
‘Monster Mash’ was
filmed on a number of SL ‘Halloween’ regions but two in particular – ‘Enchantment Island’ owned by BambiTwice
Nitely and ‘The HAUNTED MANSION at Nevermore Estate’
owned by Tosha Bergan and Brendan Macarthur deserve special mention for providing us with such fun,
laughter and great photographic and filming opportunities.
I
would heartily recommend both as part of your Second Life Halloween
celebrations.
SaveMe Oh is one of the
most interesting and unique artists currently working in Second Life. She
herself is not however easily categorised, and neither is her work – if indeed
the two can in fact be split.
She has been ejected and banned from more SL regions, art
galleries and installations than anyone else I can think of.
SaveMe has, among her other talents, an unerring ability
to piss people off.
Although SaveMe is a prolific filmmaker, a creator of
in-world installations and a performance-artist of some repute it is probably fair
to say that, actually, it is “SaveMe Oh” herself that is the “artwork”. And I
don’t say that lightly; I am quite aware how trite and clichéd it may sound.
SaveMe’s mere presence always causes an effect – sometimes
hot, sometimes cold – but never tepid. I have been at a number of exhibitions
where worried curators have in hushed whispers asked, “Is SaveMe
Oh coming?” More often than not their ban hammer is primed and ready.
And make no mistake - there is no doubt that SaveMe’s
presence can be disruptive; there is no doubt she is capable of being wicked, even
cruel; and there is also no doubt she is openly critical of other artists.
But despite this – perhaps even *because* of this – her work
always carries with it a sense of humour and fun…so long as you yourself are
not the target!
I first met SaveMe – and I wouldn’t expect her to remember
this – but I first met her at an AM Radio installation, no less, when I’d
only been in SL a few months. At this particular installation it was possible
to “spray paint” graffiti onto the side of a railway locomotive. I was there to
film a sequence for No Self Control; SaveMe was there for her
own nefarious reasons. We both wanted to use the spray-paint tool at the same
time. SaveMe graciously let me go first. I studied her profile, as I do most
anyone who comes into my range, and found my way to her films
and blog. I have to say, it took me a while to “get it” and actually
enjoy what she is doing. Over the last 2+ years I have had long discussions
about her work with Iono Allen and Tutsy Navarathna, both of whom respect what she is doing; I have also watched many of her films and also attending her installations and performance
art.
Asrecognition of her work,AviewTVare currently running aretrospective of SaveMe’s machinima. The venue, like SaveMe herself, is larger-than-life, fun and utterly
uncompromising.
I spent two hours there on Sunday evening and will return
again during the week. Her movies are streamed to various “screens” of all
shapes and sizes. It was very enjoyable and I recommend it.
I had seen many of SaveMe’s films before. Some of the films
contain nudity, many are provocative or controversial but the one common thread
running through all of them is their *great* soundtracks!
Whether it be a self-hypnosis track, a Leonard Cohen song,
El Tigre, Elvis Presley, Bessie Banks, Minnie Riperton, Billy Brown or any of a
host of many others the choice is always engaging, and often fun.
Using her work to convey her ideas, concepts, feelings,
disdain and scorn seem important to SaveMe. If SaveMe has an opinion she'll find one way or another to express it regardless of what we might
think of that opinion or of her for expressing it. And if SaveMe’s intention is that her work
provokes a response, any response, then she has succeeded beyond most any other
artist I know of in Second Life. I certainly doubt that SaveMe is attempting to
make us gasp with her technical prowess or regale us with special effects; I suspect this is of little or no
interest to her.
Selecting one of SaveMe’s films to embed here was quite difficult.
There are many I could have chosen. In the end I opted for ‘Go To Hell’ released three years ago.
The reason is that is seems to be a personal story and conveys personal
emotion, something I enjoy in any film but which is particularly difficult to
do in machinima.
Check out SaveMe’s blog,
the ninety-odd films on her Vimeo channel
and visit the Retrospective for a better appreciation of
SaveMe’s work and her influence – both hot and cold – within the Second Life
art community.
In a unique, one-off concert earlier today, three actors performed
one of Aesop’s lesser known fables on the *C I C A* region (LEA13) – ‘The Raven, the Horse and the Slug’.
Although not generally known to the public, it was
reportedly one of Aesop’s personal favourites.
‘The Raven, the Horse and the Slug’ is a tale of
how a feathered and winged endothermic egg-laying vertebrate, a odd-toed
ungulate mammal and a terrestrial gastropod mollusk challenge each other to a
race to prove who is the fastest among them.
They decide the starting point for the race will be a nearby
glasshouse where, as Aesop told it, “no
stones have known to have been thrown”. The finish line was declared to be
the peak of yonder grassy knoll “beyond the
loving rain drops”.
The raven, horse and slug take the start line, guardedly checking
that the others do not cheat. The sound of the next child laughing would be
their starting signal…
And they're off!
The horse rides off towards the hill, quickly building up to a full gallop; the raven soars fast and high intending a parabolic rainbow arc
to the mound; the slug sluggishly slugs her way past the starting line…
The raven and horse speed ahead, looking back at the poor
slug as she sluggishly slugs herself an 1/8th of an inch forward.
Neck-and-neck the raven and horse race towards their goal.
At the foot of the hill, the horse’s hooves become bogged down by the wet mud
from the rain; the raven descends like a stone, closing her eyes to the rain…
The raven wins, followed seconds later by the horse. The
slug came in three and a half weeks later.
And the moral of the story is:
“Some times the end result is exactly as you would have expected”.
“Sights, sounds and
stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be
incomprehensible to the normal mind.”
- Colonel William W. Quinn,
referring to Dachau in April 1945
Recently I visited the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London.The exhibition traces the rise of National Socialism and Nazism from
1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and the subsequent
persecution and murder of European Jews until to the liberation of the
concentration camps by the Allied and Soviet forces in 1945. Using photographs, documents, newspapers, scale models,
military footage, personal testimonials and various objects confiscated at the
camps (clothes, toys, shoes etc), the exhibition graphically demonstrates
precisely how Hitler planned to implement his “annihilation of the Jewish race
in Europe” policy.
As you can imagine, the exhibition is really very harrowing
and disturbing. It remains with you long after exiting the museum doors.
For me, one of the most upsetting aspects was the realisation
that all the people who had the terrible misfortune to get caught up in this
horrendous chapter of history were in fact normal everyday folk who could have easily
been my next door neighbour, my grocer or hairdresser; my cousin, brother or
parents.
And, perhaps even more horrifying, was the dawning awareness
that not only were the victims of the Holocaust normal everyday folk but so
were many (not ‘all’!) of the perpetrators. A lot of the prison guards, low-grade
political activists, train drivers, press reporters and many others were
previously living normal, everyday lives. For me, it is a horrifying thought
that seemingly most anyone can be turned from an upright citizen into a
criminal monster given the appropriate external stimulus. It is a form of
vanity, I think, to believe that we personally might be immune to such influences
and would have therefore behaved differently.
The controversial psychoanalyst Wilhelm
Reich explored the mechanisms of how this might occur in his
1933 book ‘The Mass Psychology of Fascism’.
Needless to say this book was quickly banned by the Nazis and Reich, realising
the danger he was in, fled Germany
for Austria and later to the
United States (where,
ironically, in 1956 he had his scientific laboratory equipment destroyed and
his writings burnt in a New York
incinerator by the FDA. Reich subsequently died in a US prison).
In one of his TV specials, ‘The Assassin’
(2011), the eccentric and multi-talented English ‘mentalist’ Darren Brown reveals how a previously
upstanding member of society with no criminal history could be “conditioned”
and “programmed” to assassinate Stephen Fry, whilst Fry performed live on stage. Brown used various “brainwashing”
techniques to accomplish this, including Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP),
hypnosis, aural and visual repetition and a host of other methods – each of
which he describes in detail as he carries them out. In another special, ‘The Heist’ (2006),
Brown uses these and similar techniques to attempt to manipulate a number of
individuals into holding up a security van in broad daylight. After receiving
the conditioning three of them proceeded to rob the van of their own accord,
voluntarily.
This is an important point, it seems to me. Although the
robbery was carried out as a result of their brainwashing – they would not have
considered doing such a thing beforehand; the “tendency” or “urge” to act thus
having been artificially implanted into their mind – the actual act of committing the
robbery was their own choice and not
because of any directly given third-party instructions.
As well as being good TV entertainment, Brown’s programmes
are often thoughtful and educational. In these particular instances they are also
a bit scary because of the potential implications.
All of this brings to mind the now infamous Milgram Experiment carried out at YaleUniversity
during the early 1960s, with detailed findings published in 1974. This
experiment was designed to observe how everyday folk respond to authority
figures. It was specifically motivated to try and understand some of the
psychological mechanisms at play within the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The
experiment found that 65% of people were willing to administer (what they
believed to be) a lethal electric shock to another person, if given an
instruction to do so by an authority figure.
Scary stuff.
As I write these words, I am at Rose Borchovski’s
deeply moving ‘The Inevitability of Fate’ exhibition
in Second Life, after having just re-watched Tutsy Navarathna’s latest machinima
of the same name (embedded below).
Rose’s installation addresses some of the same issues as the
IWM’s Holocaust exhibition but in a narrative form.
The installation tells the story of Angry Beth and Lot.
Until Lot turned eight years
old, everything was happy in their lives. However, when war came everything
changed. Lot and Beth were forced to leave
their home and became separated from each other. After a long, bitter war Beth
returned home but Lot did not.
Beth forever searches for Lot.
She has good days and bad days. On the good days, Beth imagines she is flying
like a bird, face turned skyward; on her bad days, she knows only anger at her
loss.
Beth’s wounds will never heal; Lot
was never given the opportunity to become who she was meant to be.
It is a terrifically emotional installation made possible by
a combination of the back story, the visual components of the narrative and
especially the incredible sound loops that play constantly in the background.
These sounds are tremendously good, frequently giving me
shivers and one particularly – the “I
miss…” sound loop – bringing me close to tears.
It is beautiful work by an accomplished and experienced artist.
It was fitting therefore that an equally accomplished and
experienced artist should decide to make a machinima of Rose’s installation.
Tutsy’s film of Rose’s work uses many of the visual and aural elements from the
installation itself, plus he brings his own unique flourishes and style to the
work.
The IWM’s Holocaust exhibition, Rose’s installation and
Tutsy’s machinima all tackle the same highly charged subject matter in their
own particular way – and each have added to my appreciation of what happened during
those dark days in Europe. Dark days, it should be emphasised, which were *not*
at some distant point in history, but within living memory of some of my own
family members.
I feel sadness right now. A deep sadness for what happened
then and an almost prescient expectation that something similar may happen
again, perhaps even within my own lifetime.
“Those who do not learn from history are
doomed to repeat it”.
Here is a machinima that I think is especially well done.
I don't know the filmmaker personally - Neodog1 on YouTube and Shaman Nitely in Second Life - but saw the
link posted on SLUniverse.
'Visions Beyond the
City' opens with a
slow and delicate camera track of Hangers Liquides cityscape, where
incidentally, much of my own 'Rapture' and Shaman-inspired 'FWD:
Evolution' were filmed. And, like my own treatment of Hangers Liquides
for machinima purposes, Shaman Nitely has also subject his raw footage to
extensive colour correction. He really does make it look fabulous for film.
I have in mind a future blog-post discussing colour
correction in machinima, mainly arising out of conversations with Tutsy Navarathna regarding use of the
'Fast Color Corrector', the 'Three-Way Color Corrector' and the 'Brightness
& Contrast' effects. Not a tutorial on their specific usage as such but
more a discussion on the importance of colour correction in filmmaking and the
role these effects play. I think 'Curves' is pretty well known and is already being used extensively by the SL Photoshop photography community.
Tutsy's recent MachinimUWA V winning 'The Last Syllable of Recorded Time' is probably one of the best examples of
colour correction in machinima that I know of, especially when watched in 1080. Its beautiful and delicate
colour palette has been noted by Larkworthy
Antfarm, Iono
Allen and others besides myself.
The protagonist voiceover for 'Visions Beyond the City', kicking in at just after ten seconds, reveals
beyond doubt that Shaman Nitely is English! But more...the voice is strangely
reminiscent of someone and it took me a few minutes before I could put my
finger on it! The voiceover sounds uncannily like the English 'Reservoir
Dogs' actor, Tim Roth! And, that is a good thing! I mean it as a compliment; I like
it - it is cool, gritty and real.
The film uses quite a number of lens flares, most usually in
an appropriate manner such as the nicely executed tracking of the exhaust
valves of the air-vehicles. It has to be said that although I often like the
look of lens flares aesthetically, I have personally mostly weaned myself off
them - especially since being chastised by a college lecturer for their use in
'Rapture'. Lens flares do have a part
to play, but judiciously and prudently, in my and some others' opinions. For the most part, 'Visions Beyond The
City' uses lens flares within those boundaries.
Many of the post-production effects are very well handled
indeed, and the background sound effects add a further dimension and realism to
each scene.
I especially enjoyed the character studies as the camera
pans the inner city and latches onto the denizens. That, and the use of the Plague Doctor avatar, brought to mind 'MetaSex' which, incredibly, now has over
4,500 YouTube views and 47 comments.
The voice track that kicks in around 5:11 sounds like a
old-timer working class Londoner, and could in fact be a member of my own
family on my father's side! The "vision" sequence which starts soon
after is very well done, both technically and artistically.
'Visions Beyond The
City' presents the traditional dark sci-fi feel in a stylish and stylised
manner. It has so much to commend it and is certainly one of the most all-round
polished and enjoyable machinima I have had the pleasure of watching this year.
Please take the time to watch Shaman Nitely's 'Visions Beyond the City'...
The votes have been counted and the results are in....
For the third time in a row, Tutsy Navarathna wins the
prestigious MachinimUWA contest - this time for his beautifully moving 'The Last Syllable of Record Time'.
'The Last Syllable' is arguably Tutsy's finest
machinima to date - it is a brilliant synthesis of sound and vision; the colour
palette of a true artist.
Congratulations on this marvellous achievement!
Additionally, Tutsy was also awarded the 'CinemaPop Award of
Excellence in Film Direction' and Violette Naidoo's poster for 'The Last Syllable' (pictured above) took 1st place in
the UWA Machinima Poster Contest.
2nd Place was taken by a machinima I have been
raving about since first seeing it - Natascha Randt and Karima Hoisan's 'Seek Wisdom'. A stunning work. Congrats
to both.
3rd Place was jointly awarded to Tikaf Viper for
'run RAM' and a number of others.
I am pleased to say that these three films are those I highlighted only yesterday as standing out for me and which I felt would win an award. Now, why oh why didn't I
enter the Audience Participation again this year!
For myself, I was pleased to have been awarded a 'CinemaPop
Award of Excellence in Film Narrative 2012'.
For a complete list of the MachinimUWA winners, visit the
UWA site (link not available at time of this writing).
Congrats to all winners and thanks to UWA for staging the
contest.
Here are a collection of pics I took at the Award
Ceremony...
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