20160612

Dim Sum meets the characters of SL13B




Dim Sum comes out of retirement to explore the SL13B sims.


A couple of months ago, I was looking through the SL Community Celebration site to check out this year's theme, since we were discussing the application at the International Spaceflight Museum planning meetings.

Naturally, I got distracted by the call for volunteer machinimatographers. To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to doing a build for the ISM, because I end up doing most of the work and I'm all out of ideas. And I did say in my 365 post-mortem that I want to get back to doing more machinima.

Well, the ISM didn't get a parcel in the first round, so that was a bit of a relief. Then last week, I got an email from Harper Beresford, asking if I was interested in doing 30-second teasers for the event. So, per her instructions, I contacted Doc Gascoigne to get early access to the sims, and I requested access for Dim Sum too.

I asked Doc a few questions to figure out what they had in mind, but he just told me to visit the sims and see what inspires me. I was free to do what I wanted, as long as it was PG.

So, I spent Thursday night scouting the sims and noting SLURLs of interesting builds. And when I was done with my list, I realized that I could group them into categories.

The log reindeer was the first one I noticed. It seemed to want attention, like a puppy dog peering from the edge of the pool. I imagined that it was asking if I wanted it to ferry me across the pool of water. I decided against using words in the video though, because SL is very international, so I wanted the video to tell a story with just images. (The second video will have spoken words though.)

I was too exhausted and cranky on Friday night, so I went to bed at 6:30pm. I spent most of Saturday coding a camera tool that still won't work properly. By late Saturday afternoon, I decided to just go out and film using hacks. By midnight, I was already editing. I went to bed at 4am Sunday morning.

So this first video is about the animal characters in SL13B. There are 13 scenes excluding the intro, which only has Dim Sum in it. I had to add that intro because I realized that a large percentage of people who would see this video would not know about Dim Sum. And she was the anchor — the running thread — throughout the video. So she had to be introduced. Not all scenes have her in it. I had to severely shorten the clips. Then, I had to speed them up to squeeze them more. I still couldn't them it under 30 seconds. The final version is 1 minute and 4 seconds long.

As I write this post, Harper had already blogged about it in the SL13B website.  :)

Machinima posted in:

location: SL13B sims


Technical notes

windlight: Fine Day (modified)
water: Glassy


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