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:

• Vimeo
• YouTube
  
• Flickr

location: SL13B sims

Technical notes

windlight: Fine Day (modified)
water: Glassy

169 - Lights, camera, ACTION!

Dim Sum, the low-budget movie director, tries to direct the cameraman, but he doesn't seem to be listening. She makes a note to fire him the next day.


This one is near the landing point. Nope, it's not an avatar; it's a prim cameraman, created by Debora Stine (DBy Mesh). The moving grass immediately in front of Dim Sum was created by Alex ACS.


location: Yogyakarta Borobudur Indonesia

I haven't done Strawberry's memes for a long while, and this past week's meme is fun, featuring a flat cutout of Rodvik Linden. I decided to do a machinima, instead of a still photo.

Technical notes

windlight: Coastal Afternoon (modified)

Strawberry's memes - Flat Rodvik Linden

Dim Sum, the low-budget movie director, tries to direct Flat Rodvik, but he doesn't seem to be listening either. She makes a note to fire him the next day and hire real actors. Meanwhile, she inadvertently buries him in the ground.... Oops.


(If you can't view the video above, view it in Flickr. I'm still trying to figure out why YouTube is pixelating it, even if it looks fine in Flickr.)

Many thanks to:
* Ary Luke (aryluke) who granted permission to film machinima on his sim
* "dobroide" in freesound.org for the grassland sound file

156 - RFL Catfish

Dim Sum ponders a rhetorical question.... Are catfish the mermaids of cats?


Have you heard? The Relay for Life has raised more than US$2M in the nine years it has been in Second Life!

The sims are gone now, but this was somewhere near the start of the track. I took this after doing two laps. The catfish fountain was created by Anhayla Lycia, and the lotus leaves are by Aki Shichiroji of Organica.

Okay, I have two surprises for you today, my dear readers.

1. This image has a matching mini-videoclip.  There have been times when I'd think, "Oh, I love that movement," but I couldn't capture the movement in a still photograph. So, I think I'll do these mini-vidclips for the more interesting scenes. The music will be very similar though, because I don't have time to look for different public domain music each time. This music (if you could call it that ;) ) was randomly composed using an app called the "Diatonic Composer" from AntiCulture.net.



2. The "Where's Dim Sum?" game is ready for public consumption. Yes, the one in the SL10B celebration! I had to modify the script because LSL wouldn't allow you to apply a texture on a child prim if the texture is not transferrable, and I was trying to figure out the best way to allow the user to modify the settings. The blue-dialog menus are too much like phone menus (unintuitive and long-winded) and a regular HUD would be something you have to look for in your inventory (I have 64k items in my inventory; trust me, looking for a HUD whose name you can't remember is an exercise in futility). The top scorers in SL10B already got their copies. If you are one of my "frequent favers" in Flickr or "frequent plusers" in G+, let me know your SL name and I'll send you a copy.

location: RFL Fight Back (The sims are not there anymore.)

Technical notes

windlight: Phototools- Lo Light 03 (modified)
water: Pond