Part of my lecture/presentation/motivational speech at Campus Hamburg is up thanx to Ole Etzel! Led by Xon Emoto (Hanno Tietgens) and presenting alongside Susi Spicoli and Fabrice Collette, I spoke about video tutorials making it easier for people to learn Second Life, machinima, WindLight, and inspiring. I appreciate Ole recording this, and altho it may be hard to hear me at times, after the clip is a mostly-accurate text transcription for your perusal. It prematurely fades out at the end before I got really excited, but this should give you a good idea of what happened.

If you couldn't make it, enjoy — I hope to do more like this! TED Talks, here we come! ;)

TEXT TRANSCRIPTION:

WindLight is all about giving a machinima — even if you don't like movies, WindLight technology can be enjoyed by anyone. Right now you control that in your Preferences and this video tutorial is showing you how to do that as well. After this presentation I'll give you download links. If you ever want to see some of these video tutorials, you're most welcome to.

So, next up, I've got another movie showing WindLight in action. It's inspired by Studio Ghibli and the famous director of animation, Hayao Miyazaki. You may have heard of the character Totoro. My wife and I watched My Neighbor Totoro one night and then I was inspired just one day to suddenly make a movie, a machinima about it, in Second Life.

So, the next thing is here is the movie. Let's see if this loads.

[Music playing & singing]

Thank you for watching that. And that's another example of something where I — oh, thank you so much, thank you, Art — I didn't really have much in the way of preparation. It was basically my wife and I had watched this movie and the images they came into my brain at the middle of the night.

So, on the weekend after work, I thought, I gotta make a movie about this because in Second Life the very cool thing is how we can transport cheaply.

You know in real life we often run into problems where people are trying to come up with budgets? Where they're making films to film in a place that is inexpensive but looks good because carrying the airplane with all the actors and the film crew, it gets very expensive.

But in Second Life we have the benefit of teleportation. Travel is very cheap. We can make environments around us. We can change the ground to look like a tropical island like you saw in the video and that's exactly what I did. I went to some very cool locations inworld.

And right now I will transform into that avatar for you. I will transform into the combination of Torley and Totoro called Totorleyo [Laughs] just to show you. This is the exact avatar I used in the video, and I really really love it, as you can tell. I am really a big fan of this avatar. So I got this from a place called AQUA-nimo by a creator named nimo Little. I went there and I was like, "Oh, please I'd like to have a modifiable version so I can be all in watermelon, and then I can live my dream." And that's such a fantastic example, in Second Life, of when you have a dream and you want to share it with friends and you get together and then you can just make it like that.

So that video was mostly WindLight and it shows all effects like the clouds, the sky. You can see the sunset. I did some post-processing. I mainly used a program called Sony Vegas to do my editing afterwards. It's very very nice. I like Sony Vegas more than other nonlinear editor video programs because it has an interface similar to audio production.

Actually, in my youth I was a DJ and a techno music producer. I am a big fan of Kraftwerk. They originate from Germany. I have a lot of respect for a lot of German techno. So that's sort of where I was coming from in my youth. So I like taking those audio principles of synchronizing music and visuals and bringing them into Second Life.

Yes, Kraftwerk is so awesome. I like "Computer Love". [Singing] Ta da da da. "Computer World". I like "The Telephone". I like "The Robots". [Singing] Da da da da da da da da da. All those great great riffs… and new features in Second Life. Of course, as we continue to fix the bugs, we keep adding as well — yeah, "The Model". [Singing] Ta da da da da da, ta da da da da. I think it was Rammstein they did a wonderful… was it Rammsteein? They did a wonderful version of "The Model", which is very hard rocking. I listened to that before in the car with friends while we were rocking out at midnight, very memorable.

And right here, like I'm showing you, this is art by Spiral Walcher, if you want to check out his name. He's a brilliant inworld artist. He makes wonderful things focused on glow, like this butterfly and these lily pads.

Glow is a new effect we recently added. It's part of the WindLight package, and it lets people create things like a rocket plasma-looking trails and supernatural ghosts and plasma weapons. Of course, it doesn't have to be harmful. You could have angels that glow.

Let me show you that right now. If you have glow on — and you need supported hardware by the way, it may not work; you may not see this, if you are not on supported hardware — but I will make this cube glow and you should be able to see. Okay, I'll make this cube a little bigger, just a little bigger here, and you should see it glow next to a cube that is not glowing.

And you can change these, the glow intensity. So that one, this one here, is not glowing. And this one; which I'm pointing to, or which I'm going to stand on. It's funny you can use your avatar as/like a pointer. You can stand on top of something and you can tell people, because there're spaces in Second Life — it's 3D. Yeah, great for lighting photos, exactly.

You can add a lot of atmospherics — it's all about dynamic contrasts because earlier in Second Life things looked kind of flat. And now with WindLight, now with glow, we're making it a lot more dynamic, adding a lot more range, adding realistic lighting, physically accurate modeled lighting.

We've got some mad science going on here. [Laughs] So let me just delete those cubes for now.

What else I have to show you is another picture with glow. This is a very cute picture. This was taken — yes, exactly Dizzy — sometimes we come up with glitches, things that are unintentional, or things that we — we meaning Linden Lab employees — didn't know the Residents would use it for our community. But the combination of discovery of combining elements in different ways is so wonderful when you come across effects like this.

This picture was taken by my wife and she is Totoravi. She's like Tototorley's wife. Yeah, Totoravi! And she's got a little bow on — that's how you can tell she's a girl.

In Second Life things don't have to be complex. Things can be very simple. You can focus like a Zen aesthetic on individual elements. You can focus on the simplest core emotions, love, and sometimes anger — but the resolution of that anger, you can focus on beautiful sunsets. It's always easy to turn to that. But no matter what, there's an enormous palette of tools which you, anyone, can come into Second Life and start picking this up within a few minutes.

And I know sometimes the user interface looks more complicated than it needs to be. Which is exactly why I started making video tutorials; because a long time ago when I began at Linden Lab, I was more involved with the support side of things and I was spending a lot of time explaining things in words and then trying to explain them in still pictures. I found that not to be so effective. So I thought; I will make some movies. I will show Second Life as it really is. And then that's how I evolved my video tutorials.