A quick exploration of some of my old builds which may not be there much longer! Using the Space Navigator and running Windlight in Day cycle mode (the sun and moon take a minute or two to do a full rotation)  to produce lots of moving shadows across the landscapes, people and builds. Rather than just show shadows I was keen to tie some ‘psych trance’ music into fast moving space navigator footage hence the constant movement – all shots took into account the timing with the shadows too.

The whole process was about 1 hour of capture, 1.5 hour edit and 2 hours on music track. Music was composed on Logic Pro mostly using Spectrasonics Omnisphere plug-in software ‘processor-eating’ synth.

I had access to a top end NVidia GTX280 high spec graphics card and quad processor machin so I put all SL graphics settings at max for once! The video was captured at PAL resolution using Fraps and the raw files edited using Adobe Premiere.

To have a go at this yourself make sure you have a top flight graphics card from NVidia or ATI and then download the Shadow Viewer client from Kirsten here or I believe a more recent one (that I used) from Boy Lane here. I am not sure of the widespread use of shadows given the grunt your computer needs to handle this, windlight, voice on top of all the usual networking issues – but for those with computer horsepower it definitely brings the place to life.

Published & created under creative commons – attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative, 23 May 2009 in Sydney, Australia

My Second Life sim builds included: Esperance (AFTRS), ABC Island, Melbourne Laneways, Thursdays Fictions, Deakin, The Pond and others. (I would have loved to show some more commercial & arty builds but non-disclosure and all that!)

Song ‘Speeding Cars’ by IMOGEN HEAP (used with permission of the artist)

Medium rez 48MB MP4 download here

Special thanks to

• Song: IMOGEN HEAP
• Animations: Sinewave & Abramination
• Dance consultant: Richard James-Allen Physical.tv
• Nevada timelapse footage by Gary Hayes & Nadia Warner

Machinimatography, editing, avatanimation & concept by
Gary Hayes

LYRICS by Imogen Heap

Here’s the day you hoped would never come
Don’t feed me violins
just run with me through rows of speeding cars.
The papercuts the cheating lovers
The coffee’s never strong enough
i know you think it’s more than just bad luck

There there baby
it’s just text book stuff
it’s in the ABC of growing up
Now now darling
oh don’t lose your head
cause none of us were angels
and you know I love you yeah

Sleeping pills know sleeping dogs lie
never far enough away
Glistening in the cold sweat of guilt
I’ve watched you slowly winding down for years
You can’t keep on like this…
now’s a bad a time as any

There there baby
it’s just text book stuff
it’s in the ABC of growing up
Now now darling
oh don’t kill yourself
cause none of us were angels
and you know I love you yeah

it’s ok by me..

it’s ok by me..

it’s ok by me..it was a long time ago

it’s ok by me..

it’s ok by me..

it’s ok by me..it was a long time ago

There there baby
it’s just text book stuff
it’s in the ABC of growing up
Now now darling
oh don’t lose your head
cause none of us were angels
and you know I love you yeah

There there baby
it’s just text book stuff
it’s in the ABC of growing up
Now now darling
oh don’t kill yourself
cause none of us were angels
and you know I love you yeah

A machinima by Gary Hazlitt in the new virtual world Vastpark

The music is by Gary Hayes performing live on his Salvi Julia (concert string spacing) Harp at the Contemporary Composers Festival run with the Royal Academy of Music in London a few years ago. There is added ambient mood and specialised sound effects using LogicStudio.

Filmed and Edited by Gary Hazlitt ©JustVirtual 2008

Medium rez (47MB MP4) download available here

For Vastpark enquiries contact Bruce Joy on bruce@vastpark.com

What to do on Easter Saturday afternoon? Why not create a quick “Cyborg questioning existance, looking for something and some meaning in her life” machinima. This idea came about from playing with one of the default characters in CT5 (Crazy Talk 5) and using various imported songs. I quickly made a spaceship so the ‘cyborg’ can be seen in full body, and in which I (the Golem Robot character on the right seat) can sit and drive around various sims. The lip sync character is a CT5 ‘auto lip-sync’ take against one of my long time ago ex students (now a fully fledged pop diva) Imogen Heap’s wonderful track “Hide and Seek” (I wanted something vocoderised, slightly robotic) although this goes a lot deeper thanks to Immi’s great words. Also the subtle head movements and eye positions were recorded in separate live takes withing CT5.

I needed three appropriate sims for the three phases of the song. Ones that had a sense of dawning, evolving and evolved – also that were off the ground, so the spaceship could move around, inside, under, over etc: Three sprang immediately to mind. Planet Mongo a space city (evolved – spelt wrong on video, not Mondo! sorry rush job ;-(), Svarga (dawning) and Deakin (that I built – evolving). The main process was a quick 5 hours but editing took about an hour longer than normal because of rendering, all those green screen shots (the head shots against the reversed Space Navigator backgrounds).

————————————-
A medium rez, stereo MP4 52MB version can be downloaded here
————————————

Anyways hope you like this quick ‘sketch’ – the following info is mostly duped from the YouTube description.

A machinima by Gary Hazlitt completed on easter Saturday afternoon 2008. The song ‘Hide and Seek’ is by Imogen Heap from the album ‘Speak for Yourself’.

Special thanks to the creators of Second Life sims Planet Mongo built by Lumiere Noir (spelt wrong on video sorry, rushed, not Mondo!) and Svarga built by Svarog Laukosargas. Deakin sim and spaceship for this video built/designed by Gary Hayes.

Lip sync animation created using Crazy Talk 5, green screened in Final Cut. The spaceship shots were filmed live in Second Life.

Avatanimation, machinimatography and editing (in the usual 5 hours total!) by Gary Hazlitt

A JustVirtual Production
© Gary Hazlitt 2008

I was asked by Debbie Trilling, the creative director of this show, to be the machinimatographer on the last two performances of Pink Floyd’s The Wall in Second Life recently. It was great listening to music I remember growing up with being performed by a passionate group of people from all over the world who recreated elements of the film, animated sequences and live show in one of Second Life’s most spectacular displays of creative coordination. It was created by The Cybernetic Art Research Project CARP.

There were audiences of 60+ crammed into the NMC sim which slowed things down a touch, but not noticeably (I was still getting 15 fps or so ). I have a lot of footage to edit into a short 10 minute and the longer full 90 minute film but for now I selectively scanned the footage for interesting frames and created 107 medium resolution photographs which capture a little of the atmosphere and thought put into this.

The performances have  received rave reviews over the past few weeks and over 2000 avatars have now seen the show…

• “Amazing. Not so much viewed as it is experienced” ~ Metaverse Messenger
• “All I can say is WOW. GREAT show” ~ Second Arts
• “Nothing short of spectacular. A complete immersion” ~ Looking Glass
• “Impressive, touching and thoughtful. Second Life at its best” ~ MixedRealities
• “Never seen anything like it.20A perfect amalgamation of creativity” ~ sl-newspaper
• “Cutting edge art and performance” ~ NMC Observer

Stills (on this page and on flickr link here) – Taken from Gary Hazlitt’s Machinima of CARP’s “The Wall in Second Life” – video available soon. Stills medium ‘video’ resolution.

Production Credits

The CARP Wall Team:

• Creative Director: Debbie Trilling (UK)
• Producer: Velazquez Bonetto (Germany)
• Wall Design: Elfod Nemeth (UK)
• Animated Puppets: Duggy Bing (US)
• Animations: Caravaggio Bonetto (Austria)
• Original Music: Junivers Stockholm (Sweden) & Josina Burgess (Holland)
• Stills Photography: Adec Alexandria (UK)
• Dancing & Joyfulness: Klute Copploa (France), Southern Riptide (US)

with valuable contributions from:

• Scio Kamanchi (US)
• Gypsy Paz (US)
• Lyddyn Tzara (US)
• Celeste Moonlight (US)
• DJ Jenns (UK)
• George W B ush (US)

You can download a 15MB medium rez MP4 here. It was fantastic to experience this next generation performance and witness a new layer, a narrative across the three musical movements in addition to what has been visually more abstract in the past. Other exciting elements included the movement by the dancers around the volumous space triggering elements of the soundscape and the long prim cascades they are wearing integrating seamlessly with the more static set elements. A show well worth going to (if you can get tickets) and yes, I know, my little trailer and previous well received captures of the shows only gets half way there in terms of capturing the essence (see bottom of post)…but you who are not in this world are watching/reading this

75 still photos on flickr here. Here is the official blurb

New Media Consortium (NMC) proudly presents:
DanCoyote’s ZeroG SkyDancers Third Production:
“Second Spring”.

Second Spring is a completely LIVE story performance. SkyDancers perform in-flight choreography without the benefit of animations or gestures of any kind following cues given in REAL TIME on a private IM channel. DanCoyote “calls” the show to keep time with the score written and performed by ZeroOne Paz.

DanCoyote and Technical Director ZenMondo Wormser have pulled out all the stops this time and created the most dynamic stage set ever. Set pieces will evolve, vanish and change position as the story plays out.

Production Designer Queue Marlowe has created an incredible array of SkyDancer costumes called “cascades” that are change many times over the hour long show.

Set pieces have been created by venerable Second Life artists Jopsy Pendragon and Nand Nerd. Expect the unexpected!

To be our guest at this performance please send a message to DanCoyote Antonelli. DanCoyote will invite you to join the tickets group. Seating is very limited so only members of the tickets group will be admitted to the performance space.

Please contribute generously to the donation kiosk. A production of this quality and depth takes many hundreds of hours to prepare as well as tens of thousands of Linden dollars to produce. Suggested donation is $3000 Lindens with a sliding scale from $1000 up.

Cheers!

DanCoyote Antonelli, Producer Director, ZeroG SkyDancers

=========Press Release=========
For Immediate Release

New Media Consortium Presents
ZeroG SkyDancers III – Virtual Flight Choreography

Pioneering Performing Arts Soar in the Metaverse – Again – Under the Direction of DanCoyote Antonelli

January 1, 2008, (Second Life) – Avatar DanCoyote Antonelli is accustomed to breaking new ground. Even in virtual worlds he is considered avant guarde. The real man controlling that avatar, DC Spensley, has been wowing virtual audiences since 2006 with art installations that would not be possible in real life, but perhaps the most coveted ticket in all of Second Life is one to a performance by his ZeroG SkyDancers. On January 6, 2008, the premiere of the highly anticipated, third, completely redesigned production of ZeroG SkyDancers will debut.

Second Life’s history making, critically acclaimed world performance group, the ZeroG SkyDancers is a new form of ensemble performance that uses the airspace of this virtual world, resulting in a cross between water ballet and aerial acrobatics, in ways that would not be possible in the physical world. Wearing spectacular, flowing costumes called cascades – that are many times larger than their avatars – the SkyDancers move through space, and become part of the stage themselves. Altering and evolving, their flight triggers audio samples, which provide a unique layer to the original musical score commissioned for the production.††

The production, sponsored by the New Media Consortium (NMC), will introduce an all-new reactive-interactive stage set that is repeatedly and dramatically transformed over the hour long performance. The ZeroG SkyDancers III will formally debut at 9PM Pacific Standard Time, Sunday, January 6, 2008 in the virtual world of Second Life. Seating is limited, but the show will run every week during the first 90 days of 2008, to accommodate the most guests possible. Tickets will cost $10 US ($3000 Lindens) a piece. For ticket information, please contact Spensley directly at dc@spensley.com.

Those with tickets will need to complete a 5 minute registration process with Second Life, http://www.secondlife.com , in order to access the ZeroG SkyDancers III performance.† A basic account is absolutely free, includes unlimited access to Second Life’s tools, events and communities.†Spensley recommends that audience members spend a minimum of 15 minutes learning the basic skills of the Second Life world prior to attending the performance. “Familiarizing yourself with basic navigation of Second Life will add even more enjoyment to the show,” said Spensley.

Gary Hazlitt’s video’s of two previous ZeroG SkyDancers II performances are available at YouTube and have received nearly 15 thousand views. “It’s difficult to convey the dramatic and immersive effects of the Second Life virtual world in a 2-D web environment, however the videos do convey the overall concept of the performance,” said Spensley.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_gT0YDAkec[/youtube]

“A machinima by Gary Hazlitt based on and using as background, the great song “Haunted” by Poe. Special thanks to the creators and inhabitants of City of Lost Angels, Liquid Heat and Midian City sims, you are wonderful people. Avatanimation, filming and editing by Gary Hazlitt. A JustVirtual Production © Gary Hazlitt 2007″

Posted by Gary Hazlitt from inside Second Life © 2007

• Playing mp3 file hotel california (by Multimedia Center Windows LiveWriter Plugin)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnseuxcCmA[/youtube]

I have noticed that this blog is turning into mostly things I have created in Second Life or close friends, not a bad thing I suppose as long as those creations are worth singing about. I believe this one certainly is. I was lucky to work with Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman (of Physical TV) who are the drivers behind an ‘idea’ called Thursday’s Fictions. This idea has been manifest in film, book, theatre and my task was to be the designer, producer, builder etc: in Second Life. It was only a small project compared with many of the multi sim creations I have done and are currently working on, but it excelled in being a worthy, experimental, artistic and aesthetic statement. It fell strongly into something I call Story Environments – spaces that have narrative embedded in them at varying degrees, more on that later.

The basic premise of the story is a woman who lives for one day only is trying to take her most valued creative possession (her dancers in a trunk she carries with her) between various reincarnations. There is more to it than that of course and the themes of death, love, life, mind, body, spirit all intermingle to create a fascinating pot pourii of philosophy, psychology and self awareness.

My challenge was to find appropriateness in Second Life which is itself an allegory of the themes of the piece from the outset. In other words, as I mentioned in this panel interview on SLCN.tv, (yes I talk!), SL is a space that is already routed in parallel existance, new incarnation and so on. It was about trying to find something that was different enough from quite a few existing ‘spiritual’ areas in SL but also providing links back to ‘real world’ perceptions of spiritual architecture.

I haven’t time in this blog post to go into vast detail but to say the build was done very rapidly and I worked iteratively with the writers (that included script consultant Rock Sonic – SL name) who are all relatively new to the true creative potential of this world. Some of the techniques used to deliver the narrative elements included invisible sensors that talked to you randomly, spirit ‘spheres’ that whisper as they pass through you, moving and still texts of various forms on the walls, objects and nature that chats residual and direct thoughts, sound and embedded gate-keeper questions.

There are effectively two longer form experiences at the moment. Purgatory, a series of halls and alcoves exploring a range of ideas mostly routed in one word ‘choice’. What life to go to next, what to take, decide what happened in the previous one, choose a state of mind and so on. The second experience is one life you inhabit, the ‘fractured’ mind of one of the characters. For the latter I created something that was slightly unnerving and disorientating yet also welcoming and familiar. It was loosely based on the sets of the film but I injected some play and elements of confusion. Go see and you will understand. The first main area purgatory is populated by Richard’s a range of texts, my favourite being the ‘self-destructive’ lines (in the floating spirits in the main hall) from his book Kamikaze Mind. I also wanted Purgatory to show how music, sound and visual effects, text, signs, places to explore and architecture create a new kind of experience in SL that becomes very cinematic. There were many compromises that had to be taken but happily they are all easily overcome in future experiences I will create in this and many other properties. I/we also wanted this experience to be as social as possible. In a full 3D social space anything that doesn’t allow a shared user journey through it is doomed so it has been great watching couples and small groups exploring.

There are many more elements planned for this ‘idea’ of Richards and these will include another 6 or 7 more life journeys that will attempt to cover a broader spectrum of the ‘human drama’. To go to this experience now here is a link to the starting grove – SLURL.

Posted by © Gary Hazlitt from inside Second Life

Second Life ABC Bot 02, originally uploaded by Gary Hayes.

Not sure who Jim is but the steel man sitting down is one of many early prototypes of an Artificial Intelligence Chat Bot I am experimenting with. The back-end engine for this one is freely hosted at Pandorabots.com and I am using a mixture of existing libraries across a range of subjects but also creating specific ones to various commercial and non-for profit sim developments.

I have started to use several off the shelf sculpties (single, colour map formed smooth prim) of the human form. On this one you can see I also mapped a 360 scan of one of those bio forms which makes it look a little stupid – especially with the hat. I am also doing a script at the moment that will make his head turn and arms move in synch with his chat, but the easiest way to do this is to log in as an avatar and attach the chat bot ‘object’ to the body of the avie that is kept awake artificially.

The quality of the automatic responses is improving each day and I think we are only a couple of years away from having a chat bot that is unrecognisable (in chat at least) from many, if not most, of the current SL inhabitants.

Posted by Gary Hazlitt from inside Second Life

It was a quiet New Years Day evening here on Marni and the frame rate of the world was very high, so I set myself the goal to create another film in less than five hours. To go alongside one of my favourite bio songs, Windmills of Your Mind, which has wonderfully evocative narrative and imagery. The song was sung in one take and I did the arrangement a couple of days earlier. The film was also a chance to try out some very experimental camera work, before unseen, which was great fun.

Kylie Wollongong, a close friend, was around in the early hours to play a key walk-on ‘break’ up role and I got permission from some fabulous SL artists, Clames Clanger and my two neighbours from the previous post, to use some of their creations to ‘revolve’ with. I also ventured around SL to find some Windmills but other than that it was all filmed around Marni as well as high up in the stars.

There are two embedded versions on the site here (Google first and YouTube below – you choose) but I would recommend you download a higer quality version (and stereo sound!) I have set up – 45MB WMV but worth it, click here to download it. The video makes a nice partner to the one from XMas day, although that one suffered from serious but unavoidable frame rate issues. That one is also available as better quality download, a 54MB Mp4 here.

[youtube]NC3IGDIelPY[/youtube]

Credits:

• Filmed and produced in Second Life by Gary Hazlitt
• Song “Windmills of Your Mind” Lyric: Marilyn & Alan Bergman, Music: Michel Legrand, Arr: Gary Hazlitt
• Special thanks to Second Life Artists: Space Spinners: Clames Clanger. Sound Sculptures: Adam Ramona and Mashup Islander.
• Edited by Gary Hazlitt

Posted by Gary Hazlitt © 2007 from inside Second Life