Hyperlapse

I created this video using Hyperlapse, a service that animates Google Street View. I ended up using a still shot from the location as the background for my entry in this week's Single Frame Stories Challenge. The prompt was "Hero."

Tinkerbell in Hell

I've been playing around a bit in IMVU while researching alternatives to Second Life's land-based business model. Along the way, I came up with the concept of "Tinkerbell in Hell" for this week's Single Frame Stories challenge. The prompt was "flight." I shot this video and a still photo in IMVU.

Dichotomies of Sight and Sound

One of the ideas I've been playing around with recently is the combination of unexpected combinations of musical and visual performance. Here are a couple of working concept videos that used iPhone and iPad tools to create the effects.

The first is an animation created with MovieStorm to lip-sync The Speed of Sound by Tech N9ne. The second was created using Mojo Masks to overlay a realtime mask on a live performance video capture.

Spin

This is an interactive image. You can spin it with your mouse. Go ahead. Try It! This is the angel figurine I used in a couple of Single Frame Stories, here and here. I shot and processed it in just a couple of minutes using a rotating platform and software from Arqball. 

I'm hoping to have time this weekend to try out similar technology from Strata that allows you to create 3D models from 2D photos. If all goes well, I'll scan the angel and import her into my Cloud Party island.

Santorum's warnings . . .

Bad Santa?

One of the most valuable things I've learned from virtual worlds is that our conception of reality is based as much upon imaginary projection as objective perception. In a virtual world such as Second Life we can easily remember that there is software behind the beautiful sky we see. With a little more effort and attention we can even keep in mind that there is a human of unknown age, gender and appearance behind the avtar we're interacting with.

Being able to shift awareness in and out of immersion in virtual life is a great exercise for awakening to the analogous phenomenon in the atomic world. Our experience of physical life is no less a construction of our minds. The dome of Earth's sky is actually blue light scattered across the atmosphere. Although we can't read other people's minds, we usually act as if we know exactly what they're thinking.

For the past year or so, I've been playing around with using dolls and action figures to expose how our minds reflexively construct personality, identity and story. For instance, the toys in the image above weren't posed. The were just sitting on a shelf at an antique mall. But one glance was all it took for my mind to reflexively translate the sensory impressions into an evocative story. By noticing and capturing this mental process with toys, my hope is that I'll have an easier time remembering it with people. Someday.

I Am Not Playing!

Cindy's Inner Child

Buffy is Exhausted

After having a lot of fun with 100 Word Stories, I recently stumbled onto an even more condensed micro-tale format in The Tiny Book of Stories. It's an anthology of 67 works that combine a few lines of text and an illustration. It's likely you'll see a lot more of these here over the next few weeks while I'm busy working on a new long-form comic, "The Death of Botgirl." (Yes. That was a teaser.)

The Lazy Avatar's Guide to iPhone-Powered Machinima

Machinima ( /məˈʃiːnɪmə/ or /məˈʃɪnɪmə/) is the use of real-time 3D computer graphics rendering engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, games are used to generate the computer animation. Wikipedia

Over the past three years I've experimented with many methods, styles and platforms in the course of creating about 90 machinima. I love making videos and the medium has been a very important aspect of my creative life.

One of my reasons for living a fairly public life through an avatar identity is to encourage and support the use of virtual worlds as a platform for creative expression. Although virtual photography is a pretty universal medium of artistic expression, only a relatively small percentage of the avatar community makes machinima. I suspect the main reason is that the technical aspects of video creation are relatively more complex and intimidating. So I thought it would be helpful to share a quick and easy method I've been using to create simple music-video style machinima using an iPhone, iPad or iTouch. If you're like me and are too lazy for the 48 Hour Film Project, here's my 4.8 Hour Machinima Project methodology:

1. Teleport into a cool setting
2. Activate a dance animation
3. Capture a variety of shots using your mobile device's camera
4. Start a new iMovie project
5. Add a music track from iTunes Library
6. String together some of your shots
7. Export video
8. (optional) Use a program like Silent Film Director or Cinema FXV to spice up the look 
9. Upload to Vimeo, YouTube or Flickr

I was playing around in IMVU this weekend so I decided to shoot a couple example videos there. I used the same avatar look and dance animation in both videos. I changed the set, the effects and the music to create two very different feels. They were each created from start to finish in just a few hours.

Early Valentine's Day Video Greeting Card

After a week of serious posts, a little silly fun for your viewing pleasure.

First Take on Blue Mars Mobile Including Over-Hyped Video Trailer

Blue Mars developer Avatar Reality announced a restructuring last month that is shifting focus to a mobile version of their platform. They released an initial free version for the iPhone and iPad last week, which:

. . . allows users to view and rate avatars and fashions from Blue Mars, which populates the results on the "Top-Rated". They can also use the "Recents" option to track avatar updates and see the latest fashions. From Blue Mars blog

I decided to give it a try. The initial version is very limited, but feels really responsive. Downloading an avatar takes only about ten seconds. Once it's there you can pan, rotate and zoom with standard iOS gestures. You can view a list of avatars by either popularity or recency, and also search for them by name. Unfortunately, at this time you can only create or modify an avatar using their PC client. Which is a big problem.

One issue is that it only runs on a Windows. Although the client supposedly can run under Parallels or Boot Camp on a Mac, I couldn't get it running despite three hours of trying. Didn't find any useful help in their forums. So I dug up a mid-level Windows notebook and finally got it working after downloading a huge file and installing the most recent version.

Even after logging on successfully, it was way more frustrating than fun. The response was very sluggish and it took over an hour to find a shop with decent clothing for sale. Along the way I downloaded three additional 300+ megabyte locations. Nope. Not fun at all.

Needless to say, few iPhone or iPad users are going to be willing to go through hours of downloads and searching just to create a marginally customized avatar just for viewing. But despite the initial kludginess, I'm still optimistic that when they bring avatar customization into the mobile app, the experience will be much better and it will eventually evolve into a fun 3D avatar chat application:

Future updates will include such enhancements as avatar customization, interaction with other social networking platforms, the ability to chat with other Blue Mars users, and integrated shopping of clothing and other items via Apple's in-App purchase feature. From Blue Mars blog

For now, here's a totally over-hyped trailer I put together showing both the iPad and iPhone versions.

Immersion Maze: Avatar Embodiment Versus the Pervasive Social Stream

This video is about the interplay between immersion in a world (virtual or physical) and the pervasive  presence of the social network. I used a visit to the Art Maze exhibition in Second Life as the underlying visual anchor. There are a number of dimensions I tried to illuminate:

• Embodied Immersion in Second Life (Art Maze) 
• Psychological Immersion in the Social Network (profile pic room)
• Physical presence viewing the computer screen (implied via video shot with iPhone)

Please play at high volume.
Music is by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, My Heart, My Life (Remix) from Star Rise CD.

Night and Day iPhone-Produced Retro-Future Mash-Up Short

I captured a bit of the action on an iPhone Tuesday, as Night was shooting video for our next episode of Night and Day. This little clip was put together while playing with the new version of Vintage-Video. The audio combines a few snippets from episode one, stitched together with loops on Garage Band. The final video was edited and rendered on an iPhone using iMovie.  I was going for a future-retro 1920's/2020's look with a cheesy 1970's soundtrack. Fun!

Ghost Dancer

This was with an iPhone 4 after noticing the reflection of the laptop keyboard on the screen. No compositing, just a bit of wide time.

Brief Proof-of Concept Mixing External Animation into SL Machinima With New Media Sharing Feature

This is my first tentative proof-of-concept playing around with the idea of integrating external video in an inworld Second Life machinima. It uses the new Media Sharing functionality that enables the flexible and interactive display of media directly on a prim.

For this test, I stood in front of a large prim displaying my "skull speaks" video. Just for fun, instead of using Snapz Pro to capture video, shots were captured using a handheld iPhone's camera and then edited on the phone using Vintage Video Maker and ReelDirector.

There's great potential in combining various types of external media within a realtime machinima capture. I hope to devote more time to this in the near future and put together something a bit more ambitious.

"Naturalized" Photo and Video Depict Integration of Virtual and Physical Worlds

The photo above is the latest in a series of images and videos shot with an iPhone. These naturalized images take me into a physical world setting without any green screen tricks to fake my placement in a physical world environment. Outside of clean-up to fix color balance and some minor air-brushing, what was there is pretty much what you get.

Although it's been fairly experimental so far, in weeks ahead you'll see me extending the concept of naturalized stills and videos into a number of human settings... participating in discussions around the family dinner table, out for a walk at the park..the sky's the limit! (hint, hint).

On a whim, we threw together a short behind-the-scenes video to provide a little flavor of the mix of physical and virtual in the shooting session for the image above.

Fun Second Life Video Test Shot and Edited on iPhone

I got to play model today for a low-fi machinima screen test. It was created by shooting a laptop screen with an iphone, and then editing it right on the phone with ReelDirector. This is just quick demonstration, but I think the technique has some promise.