I love the art of storytelling, in all its forms. I’d love to have been able to present a story within Second Life, to direct it with my own vision. There are other places where this is more feasible and I’m currently liking the look of Cloud Party for this sort of venture.
However for a good story you need good content too, especially when it’s visual. This is also true for those who make machinima. I have recently been looking at a science fiction machinima short entitled “[Vengenace + Vengeance]“.
This wasn’t shot in Second Life, although Second Life is home to many good examples of machinima. [Vengeance + Vengeance] was created with the Unreal Development Kit 2010-08-Beta , Autodesk Maya 2011, Adobe CS5 Master Suite and ZBrush 4.0. However many of the props could be used in Second Life style machinima, some of the effects and certainly the facial character animations aren’t what you’d see in Second Life but the content, textures, etc they could certainly be at home in Second Life.
One of the things with machinima, due to the fact that it’s often a short production, is to try and find some background to the story. There won’t be much time for character development, especially in a story that lasts less than twenty minutes. Fortunately this example has a synopsis:
“In a world where technology has leveraged politics and military is controlled by corporations, only the cleverest or most brutal survive. The Resnick Corporation through advanced genomic research stands poised to control weapon development with an advanced soldier prototype. The only problem, the prototype has gone wrong.
[Vengeance+Vengeance], a contemporary adaptation of “The Hunter” by Richard Stark (AKA Donald E. Westlake) places an Asian female in the role of the main character Parker. It’s a world set in a dystopian future where human life is a commodity to be toyed with by the powerful. Science has become the key to domination and those who control it the rulers. Lily, our protagonist is blessed with natural talents of athleticism and intelligence. A research scientist who’s specialization is in nanotechnology and its use in biomimetics and organic synthesis is employed by the Resnick Corporation. We find her discarded in a hostile wasteland where the results of diabolical genetic engineering have produced a distorted population of mutants. Who has put her there and why? Using brute intelligence and raw violence to overcome her adversaries Lily finds that all is not as it appears. Her efforts have been distorted and corrupted. Is she the only one who can set things straight?”
Reading that will help you to get more out of the story if you find the time to watch it, you can view the movie and more about it at the link I’m about to post now:
http://vengeancevengeance.com/index.html
The film is brought to life by Mark Chavez and his team. Machinima can require quite a few hands to bring it to fruition, your mileage will vary, it’s not something that people can just fire up and get on with but it is something that a team who know what they’re doing can create at a much lower cost than was formerly the case.
Returning to the synopsis we learn more about the process that went into creating this short:
“[Vengeance+Vengeance] is a movie that is authored in a game engine, designed in three different styles. We varied the characterization between three design targets. Our standard style targets naturalistic proportions and colors, our cute style targets cartoon-like rounded shapes and colorful though soft tones and our extreme style attempts a more film-noir look with exaggerated though human proportions, more texture detail and an overall more contrasting tonal treatment. Typically this design style is used when she is in vulnerable situations. We use this style to draw empathy from the audience making the character more child-like and vulnerable in appearance.
The movie is created interactively by blending through these three design styles in a interactive director driven authoring system. What is presented is the final outcome of the work where the design of the characters changes in volume and color tone to manipulate the viewer’s experience.”
Now where this sort of thing may head is that some people don’t have the skills to create the content themselves, as in props, scenery, animations but they will want to buy them because they have the vision to tell a story. This is actually along the lines of where I think Linden Lab may be going with trying to open up markets to Second Life content creators beyond Second Life. Linden Lab, many suspect, are going to open the door to indie game developers from Desura. However the same principle would hold true for opening up the market to content creators to sell wares to machinima makers.
This is why I like looking at machinima, you see new stories, or old ones with a new spin, you see new concepts and you see areas where markets may grow for independent film makers and content creators, it’s all very encouraging but it will also need a huge slice of good fortune to really take off and become more widely accepted.