Machinima Assignment

This is a multi-part assignment. The end product should be a short (< 2 minutes) short film of your choice, shot in second life. The topic may be fiction (a short skit), or non fiction (a news report, etc.). It must make use of a customized set, and must be made available on YouTube–or the sharing site of your choice.

Part 1 – Sets & Script

Due by midnight on Saturday, October 7 (to give you some class time to do some final work on it).

While multiple scenes may be shot elsewhere in SL, at least one of these scenes should be shot “on set,” on a set that you have designed especially for the purposes of this activity. You should set aside some space (and the land we meet on is fine for this), to create the place you will be interacting. Like any set, it only needs to look good from the angle you will be shooting. Think of this not as building a real edifice, but creating something that, when shot from the various angles you will be using, will look appropriate. For example, a news set might include somewhere for the avatars to sit, a desk, and a backdrop, but it need only look good from the angle of the camera.

You are welcome to spend up to $L1000 on materials for the set, but you can’t subcontract on this one. The work should be your own. (In other words, you can buy chairs, videos, textures, etc., but must assemble them yourselves.)

Before we meet on Thursday (October 4), you should post a progress report with each participant indicating what you have done so far. No free riders, please… everyone should contribute to the project. If you have mid-build snapshots, all the better.

By the Saturday deadline, each person should update on progress, and the team leaders (Mogue & Naimya) should post snapshots of the final set (and a SLurl, if it’s not on my land). The group leader should also post the final version of the script, which should include brief descriptions of the shots, as well as what any actors / voiceover will say.

Part 2 – Video

Deadline: Thursday, October 11, by class time.

Shoot your video, capturing it to a movie file. (A quick screencast showing how to accomplish this will follow shortly, along with links to more resources.) Edit this in your editor of choice, and post to your video sharing site of choice (e.g., YouTube).

I’m looking for something that is engaging, and makes good use of the SL environment. I don’t expect it to be perfect. If you are ambitious, I hope you will consider using gestures to provide speech-like behavior on your avatars, but this is absolutely optional. You can make for a compelling machinima with out it. Story matters as much as execution, so make sure that in your short film, you are telling a story that makes sense. Make use of titles or voiceover, if you like, to make sure that it keeps the viewer interested, surprises her, and affects the way she thinks or feels.

For our Thursday meeting

We ran out of time last time around. Sorry if I cut us off toward the end.

I’ve gotten a couple of emails about what you need to have done for Thursday. Both problems with the update (I’ll be sure to check before class this time!), and our quick dart out for the talk put us a bit behind schedule. Work on your building skills–especially structures–and we’ll push the “group competition” to the following week so that we are all starting from the same place. Have the readings done and be sure to blog on them–I should have grades up before out meeting.

See you Thursday–and remember to be voice-ready .

Alternative Blogging & Class Meeting?

If you would prefer to, you may attend and write about one of the sessions at the free Dr. Dobb’s Life 2.0 conference. They are doing a boot camp right now (as I speak) focussed mainly on scripting, and there are some really interesting talks (including some discussion of the Open Grid) over the next few days.

How do folks feel about meeting there to attend the talk during our class time this Thursday. There are two talks being given:

NOON – 1:00 PM SLT	EOLUS McMillan – EOLUS island is the most advanced experiment in SL-to-RL integration yet, comprising a 3D user interface to environmental control, ERP, v-commerce and other applications. Hear its chief architect describe the technologies and techniques, and join us later at 3:30 PM for a guided tour of EOLUS Island.
METAVERSE METRICS AND ANALYTICS
1:00 – 2:00 PM SLT	Hackshaven Harford (MayaRealities) – As head of NOAA’s metaverse efforts, and prime mover behind a cross-disciplinary cooperative of government science and educational organizations in Second Life, Hackshaven Harford is a sophisticated consumer of metrics data. Now, as principal of MayaRealities, he’s a metrics service provider as well.
2:00 – 2:30 PM SLT	Jay Clarke, IBM – One of the chief architects of IBM CodeStation shares some of what he’s learned about creating developer communities in the metaverse.
TOURS (meet in amphitheatre)
2:30 – 3:30 PM SLT	TOUR: IBM – We’ll visit CodeStation and other developer resources across the IBM archipelago

I’m sure if we are a little late to the first one, it’ll be OK. Not sure the last one is necessarily as much of interest, but it might be…

What do you think? If we do this, we’d put off our discussion on demographics until the following week…

UPDATE: OK, looks like the consensus is to attend (with some dissenters). Let’s meet at 3:30 at the usual spot, we’ll talk a little about your experiences with building and some other odds & ends, then we’ll head over for the NOAA talk and the IBM talk, then regroup to debrief a bit. -A

Week 4 Assignment: Demographics and Chairs

1. READ Castranova and SL chapters.

2. BLOG about who is on SL and what you think they want. Chat with some users and try to figure it out.

3. BUILD a piece of furniture, of your choice. Does not have to be beautiful. Something sit-able would be good. Blog about the process, and bring the item for show-and-tell on Thursday.

Schedule Update

As some of you noted, we are a bit off-plan as folks got settled in with the blogs and set up in Second Life. So,

Sept 13: In our skins
Due:
* Who’s doing things right
In class:
* Basic branding rules discussion
* Body mod & shopping
* Very basic building & t-shirt making

Sept 20: Giving the people what they want
Read:
* Castranova
* SLOG 4, 5, 9, 11
* How to build a chair
Due:
* Blog: Who are the users and what do they want?
* Blog: If you won a million Lindens?
* Build: Any piece of furniture
In-class:
* Discussing needs online
* Demographics and change over time
* Psychographics and virtual community/social capital

Sept 27: Artificial Economies
Read:
* SLOG 7, 10
* SL Land Deal goes Sour
Due:
* Blog: Economics of second life
* Group building competition

Week 3 Assignment: SL Business Tourguide

The text for the class provides some suggestions for places to visit. Let’s develop our own set, but with a slightly different purpose. Let’s take a look at exemplars of good branding “locations” in Second Life. Last class we visited one: a spot meant to promote the “Transformers” movie–but this is just one of many examples. Use in-world and out-of-world search to find companies who have turned to SL to market the image of their Real World products and services. (That is, we aren’t looking for companies that sell only or primarily in Second Life.)

Tour some of these possibilities, and pick one that you think has created the best experience for image management. Tell us what you think they are doing that works well, and how those best practices could be generalized to be put into effect for other branding efforts. By the end, we should collectively have a group of exemplars, and a collective set of advice for a company wanting to set up an experience in SL.

You should provide the following in your blog post (by Tuesday!):

1. The location you visited. In

2. At least one picture of the spot taken in-world.

3. A brief summary of your experience touring the location.

4. An indication of what makes this your top pick.

5. What lessons can be learned from this and applied to other branding efforts in SL.

Andy noted that the pictures you take in-world are saved on your computer as BMPs. If you have Photoshop, or another piece of photo editing software, translating these into a web format (PNG, GIF) is not difficult. You can also use flickr, I believe. There are a lot of utilities you can download for free that will do this for you, and there are many (e.g., Zamar).

Any questions? Post them below.

Syllabus

To come.