Volavola Preview and Making-of Special @ art.clouds 2009

From Creative Machinery

I will be doing a presentation about the "The Making of Volavola" at the media festival art.clouds 2009 [ghosts in the machine] in Regensburg Germany.

The festival will run from 8 to 17 october, at several locations in Regensburg, and features movies, lectures, performances, workshops and more.

15 October at 20:00 I will talk about how Volavola was made, and show a preview of the movie at the Akademiesalon, Andreasstr. 28.

Please visit the art.clouds 2009 [ghosts in the machine] blog for more information about the festival, and the Volavola / Fly me post for details about my presentation.

Volavola on wired.com

Bruce Sterling picked up on Hamlet's Au post and blogged it on wired.com.
No in depth article or anything, but hey! we managed to disorient him ;-)

Also Domenico Quaranta mentioned our little sneak peak, which was picked up by gamescenes, a very nice blog.

Orchestral Investigation #9, and seeing spOts, being dOts in Brazil

2 of my machinima are (or were) shown at Itau Cultural in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
(My portugese is kinda rusty, and I see different dates on different sites)

From Creative Machinery

For the exhibition "GamePlay", Isabelle Arvers curated the machinima program "Mostra Machinimas". For this program she selected seeing spOts, being dOts (Vendo Marcas, Sendo Pontos), a collaboration with Juria Yoshikawa and Nnoiz Papp, and Orchestral Investigation #9 (Investigações Orquestrais #9), a collaboration with Avatar Orchestra Metaverse.

The entire machinima programme is listed here: http://www.itaucultural.org.br/index.cfm?cd_pagina=2716&cd_noticia=6635

Volavola Scene 61 on NPIRL and NWN, and some more about the toon effect

So far the reactions to the scene of Volavola we posted are pretty good!

Bettina Tizzy posted it on Not Possible IRL, one of my favorite blogs.
Hamlet Au posted it on New World Notes, elaborating a little on how we distinguish between what happens in Second Life, and what happens in Real Life, as all the footage was shot in Second Life.
Our solution, to apply a toon effect on the second Second Life footage seems to be received well by the Second Life community.
I agree with Gwyneth Llewelyn, who said "..it doesn't look like SL, but just as an incredibly detailed cartoon! If this catches on, the Japanese studios that spew out a cartoon per week for their so many huge series will start doing it all inside SL... :)".
Rendering this effect is far from RealTime though (about 3 seconds per frame), so maybe not so appropriate for that weekly tv show.

I'm also experimenting with this kind of effect for Woody, to emphasize the "comic" style of Ookoi.
It also has the advantage of not really needing all that detailed shapes and textures in Second Life during shooting.
I guess a "pure machinimatographer" would want to stay away from too much post processing work, but in my opinion it's best to just use the tools appropriate for the result you want to achieve.

Finishing Volavola !

Almost done postprocessing Volavola!

Here is a preview.



In this scene Sofia (puppeteered by Honey Fairweather, voice by Sofia Vigliar) and Matteo (puppeteered by Blued Food, voice by Flavio Aquilone) meet eachother in Second Life and visit the virtual gallery of Gazira Babeli.

The music is original for the movie and done by Andrea Gabriele. It's an adaption of a folk song from Abruzzo called Vola Vola.

Because this machinima version of VolaVola is entirely filmed in Second Life we needed to make clear what happens in Second Life and what happens in Real Life. For this pupose we applied a toon effect on the Second Life scenes.
In the Real Life version of the movie the original footage will be used.