For anyone interested in Second Life Education (SLED) I urge you to join their respective listserve mailing lists. The SLED community has been thriving for several years and can provide a great bit of knowledge. Have a question about Second Life? Search the archives!
SLED listserve: https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators
SLED Archives: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=001010425210852223575%3Ajldmgpuier0
SLED Wiki: http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki
Machinima listserve
SL has recently started a listserve for anyone making or interested in machinima.
Machinima listserve: https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/machinima
Friday, September 28, 2007
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
SL Machinima will save YouTube
Reuters/Second Life � HBO buys machinima film created in Second Life: "“You can build visually rich dense environments in an incredibly short amount of time, and you can work collaboratively using the tools of Second Life,” said Gayeton, who currently works for the virtual world development agency Millions of Us. “It gives you an idea of how animation will look five years from now.”"
Think of all those sub-par videos on YouTube that could have been more effective, artistic, or powerful with a budget. Making machinima in SL is like making movies with an endless budget. If you can dream it, you can visualize it in Second Life. Granted it will take some time, effort, and know how.
I would like to differentiate from the statement above however... SL does not produce high quality animation. It is shaping how animation will look five years from now not on cinematic or graphical quality... but based on the fact that it comes to the masses in the age of socially motivated peer production; a time when a younger generation of content creators is willing to produce for little or no financial gain, to experiment and take risks with limited resources or expertise at their disposal, and unafraid of critical peer review.
Animation, like film, is a highly refined art form with masters of its craft held in the highest regard. So how will a new generation of "tinkerers" affect it? I must admit... I am one of the tinkerers. I recently created a machinima video to promote the sale of my graphic novel.
I could not afford studio time on an infinity wall to shoot this properly in real life. However, with machinima... it took only 3 hours to make that video. And that includes building the drawing table.
Next week in Ann Arbor Michigan my newest video, "Machinima Paradiso", opens at The Project Gallery in a show titled, "My Private Utopia" (more info at the site). This machinima video is almost 5 minutes in length and includes scenes over large bodies of water, flying through a movie theatre, and down a NYC Times Square like corridor of giant images. If created in real life, I am approximating the budget to be well over $750,000. However, I have been able to put it together on my laptop in little over three months.
Is machinima a new form of storyboarding? Will it produce a new farm-team-crop of filmmakers and animators? Will access to this media in both SL and through outlets like YouTube reshape our idea of what can be produced "on a budget?"
Think of all those sub-par videos on YouTube that could have been more effective, artistic, or powerful with a budget. Making machinima in SL is like making movies with an endless budget. If you can dream it, you can visualize it in Second Life. Granted it will take some time, effort, and know how.
I would like to differentiate from the statement above however... SL does not produce high quality animation. It is shaping how animation will look five years from now not on cinematic or graphical quality... but based on the fact that it comes to the masses in the age of socially motivated peer production; a time when a younger generation of content creators is willing to produce for little or no financial gain, to experiment and take risks with limited resources or expertise at their disposal, and unafraid of critical peer review.
Animation, like film, is a highly refined art form with masters of its craft held in the highest regard. So how will a new generation of "tinkerers" affect it? I must admit... I am one of the tinkerers. I recently created a machinima video to promote the sale of my graphic novel.
I could not afford studio time on an infinity wall to shoot this properly in real life. However, with machinima... it took only 3 hours to make that video. And that includes building the drawing table.
Next week in Ann Arbor Michigan my newest video, "Machinima Paradiso", opens at The Project Gallery in a show titled, "My Private Utopia" (more info at the site). This machinima video is almost 5 minutes in length and includes scenes over large bodies of water, flying through a movie theatre, and down a NYC Times Square like corridor of giant images. If created in real life, I am approximating the budget to be well over $750,000. However, I have been able to put it together on my laptop in little over three months.
Is machinima a new form of storyboarding? Will it produce a new farm-team-crop of filmmakers and animators? Will access to this media in both SL and through outlets like YouTube reshape our idea of what can be produced "on a budget?"
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Quechup to the times...
Quechup.com is one of the newest social networking sites to pop up and has made quite an impact on me, albeit in a negative way.
Earlier today I was invited to join the network. I accepted the invite and decided to make a profile and check it out. During the set up it said it would look though my gmail address book and see who else was on Quechup. After it got done thinking, there were four check boxes. It said "would you like to be friends with these people". Since they were already on Quechup, I clicked yes.
Apparently when I clicked yes, Quechup sent emails to EVERYONE ELSE in my address book inviting them to be my friend on the Quechup site. (For more of my personal reactions to this incident, check out my personal blog at www. anthonyfontana .vox.com). This is a familiar process for those who use facebook. However, without one additional page asking if I'd like to invite everyone by email.
This incident (and of course, a PAID networking site) got me thinking about the amount of trust we put into social networking sites. It may have said somewhere on that page "would you also like us to spam everyone in your address book with an invite to our site?" But my intuitive reaction was to click yes, invite the four friends you have checked. There was a level of trust there, built by similar interfaces on other sites, that Quechup took advantage of.
Now comes the kicker. During my profile setup, it asked me questions about height, eye color, as well as whether or not I live with my children. However, when I tried to enter simple information in the text box, things like "I'm an educator," or "I use Second Life", an error message appeared informing me NOT to put that sort of info on their site due to "identity theft on social networking sites." It then gave me the same error message when I tried to enter such things as "art, movies, and music" as interests.
Here, Quechup is trying to build a false level of trust by insisting that they are protecting me, meanwhile collecting a lot more information than other social networking sites have. Was I willing to give up the info... sure. Will I now? I don't think so.
How can we establish trust with websites that promote trust in relationships? What role does intuitive interface play in our expectations of service? What happens to our trust when these expectations are not met or even worse broken?
Earlier today I was invited to join the network. I accepted the invite and decided to make a profile and check it out. During the set up it said it would look though my gmail address book and see who else was on Quechup. After it got done thinking, there were four check boxes. It said "would you like to be friends with these people". Since they were already on Quechup, I clicked yes.
Apparently when I clicked yes, Quechup sent emails to EVERYONE ELSE in my address book inviting them to be my friend on the Quechup site. (For more of my personal reactions to this incident, check out my personal blog at www. anthonyfontana .vox.com). This is a familiar process for those who use facebook. However, without one additional page asking if I'd like to invite everyone by email.
This incident (and of course, a PAID networking site) got me thinking about the amount of trust we put into social networking sites. It may have said somewhere on that page "would you also like us to spam everyone in your address book with an invite to our site?" But my intuitive reaction was to click yes, invite the four friends you have checked. There was a level of trust there, built by similar interfaces on other sites, that Quechup took advantage of.
Now comes the kicker. During my profile setup, it asked me questions about height, eye color, as well as whether or not I live with my children. However, when I tried to enter simple information in the text box, things like "I'm an educator," or "I use Second Life", an error message appeared informing me NOT to put that sort of info on their site due to "identity theft on social networking sites." It then gave me the same error message when I tried to enter such things as "art, movies, and music" as interests.
Here, Quechup is trying to build a false level of trust by insisting that they are protecting me, meanwhile collecting a lot more information than other social networking sites have. Was I willing to give up the info... sure. Will I now? I don't think so.
How can we establish trust with websites that promote trust in relationships? What role does intuitive interface play in our expectations of service? What happens to our trust when these expectations are not met or even worse broken?
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