I hereby present to you, and hope you will enjoy, Second Life in Balance!
(The name is a shameless homage to the Qatsi trilogy.)
When you read my blog, it quickly becomes apparent how I work in parallel with multiple trains of thought. Passengers from one transition to another, and some travel in tandem — which reminds me of an old story my Mom told me about driving up to the beach with her big family, two cars side-by-side on the wide road, and they played a risky game of tossing a watermelon back and forth between them (I presume these were convertibles!).
Some previous posts have been leading up to what I have for you today. Fueled by Delta by way of Philip Glass who composed the scores for the Qatsi trilogy, I'm absolutely enamored with timelapse photography & videography showing "movement in still life" (which in itself is a nod to BT). Five months ago, I said:
I'll pull no punches. We have a rising tide of extremely talented machinimakers, showcased monthly @ Alt-Zoom Festivals and collectively covering a broad spread of narrative styles. But say I wanted to watch SL's equivalent of the Discovery Channel, like caterpillars-into-butterflies-before-my-eyes. Where do I find this? There are some great specialist videos showing timelapse things being built, for the express purpose of being built. Pierce Portocarrero's work is notable (disclaimer: I did the soundtrack for that!), as is Robbie Dingo's guitar-building-in-hyperspeed. But where's the incidental… the accidental, even?
We don't have inworld webcams.
If you're wondering what relevance that has to the mainline, consider this: we do not have independent objects we can setup on an inworld stand in Second Life, and have them snap pictures automatically.
Being frustrated at this lack, I decided to use an avatar-as-cam and perched myself on a sandbox sign, zooming wide (Ctrl-8 twice did the trick) and setting draw distance to 512 m. I sat to ensure I wouldn't be moved or pushed around, which would ruin the shot. Making sure to get a good view of the clouds (they are, after all, an important visual component in much timelapse art), I set up a macro program to trigger Ctrl-` (save snapshot to disk) every 30 seconds. Then, I went to bed.
Waking up, I had several hundred photographs which I assembled into a continuous slideshow. Each lasts only 0.666 seconds and played in continuous sequence, it appears much smoother than one might think. I also edited in some eye candy — not so much to be distracting, but "accents".
I also made certain to add extra contrast. Some comment that Second Life looks "flat" compared to games on the market, and that's in part because while gamma can be adjusted, contrast can't be independently, so some sweet postprocessing took care of that.
Accompanied with a pumping music track which is more Detroit-techno-with-pizzicato-plucking than meditative looping, I was almost all set.
Finally, I rendered the work and uploaded it to YouTube.
You can download the raw images for your own usage.
I did this simply because I was hoping someone else would do it, and I didn't see it, so I got busy. If I missed anyone's filmmaking doing exactly this, and/or if someone takes the artform further, of course I'm eager and open to admire them. I'm very much hungry for more, and maybe someones will have a go at creating a whole feature-length showing everyday Second Life as it's lived: paranoid shots of the Welcome Area almost like a security droid's integrated cam, towers being built and wiped in sandboxes, the dancing crowd and busybodies rushing in a gaming parlor, an accelerated car sequence much like this but with rubberbanding, Resis completing Orientation Island and continuing the first day of the rest of their Second Lives —
I know I'd love it.