Amazing Machinima Tribute to Second Life’s Artist Community Is Also Among the Best SL Machinimas Ever Made

This jaw-droppingly awesome machinima, “Artists in SL”, is a tribute to Second Life Flickr artists who inspired its creator, Teal Aurelia, and is in turn a tribute to Second Life as an artist’s digital toolchest and community. I don’t say this often, but it’s also one of the best SL-based machinimas ever made in the metaverse platform’s near-20 year history.  But please watch and judge for yourself.

Teal is a recent art school grad, and I sort of suspect we’ll be seeing much more of her work for a growing fanbase. Her art degree was inspired by creating in Second Life:

“Making machinima in SL was one of the things that led me to my degree in animation,” she tells me. “I started out learning real life wildlife documentary [filmmaking], but it didn’t really let me tell stories, so I tried filming in Second Life for fun. I was still limited by the animations I could find in-world.

“Obviously,” she adds grinning, “the only solution was to get into ridiculous amounts of student debt and go study how to make things move myself.”

Here’s how she discovered Second Life and a glimpse behind her creative process: 

Discovering Second Life

I was living in Thailand briefly, and being an Alaskan I really wasn’t dealing with the heat well. My apartment complex had an Internet/gaming café that was air-conditioned, and kids in the building would hang out there playing Second Life. My Thai was terrible but I wanted to make friends, so I let them teach me how to fly around and find crazy freebie hair.

The SL Flickr community really kept me sane in my final year of university. I was getting really burned out while working on my grad film, and needed something creative that I could complete in a couple of hours, so I started editing SL photos. I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did, and people have been really generous with their time and knowledge. After I graduated, I wanted to make a kind of thank-you to the community as a whole. I didn’t want it to be a video about my avatar, so I started asking if people would let me film theirs. I feel like Flickr isolates artists a bit as we rarely cross paths inworld, so how amazing would it be to bring all these different people together in one shot?

I also wanted to try making an SL video that was as heavily edited as most SL photos. Machinima gets far less attention than photography, and yet it has just as much – if not more – potential. Anyone can make it, so I hope I can encourage a few more people to give it a go.

Creating “Artists of SL”

That was really a struggle. I’m working on a mediocre laptop and mediocre wi-fi, so I can’t film large scenes. I knew I wanted a crowd of artists in this video, so the only way to achieve it was to film everyone individually in front of a green-screen, and edit it onto backgrounds I shot separately. The backgrounds aren’t filmed in-world at all. I got the idea from the SL Flickr community – where most heavily-edited photos are edited on non-SL backdrops to look more realistic. My film was about the avatars, so I wanted to do everything possible to push the visual style of SL video. [See her making-of video above]

I just graduated, so this is the laptop that got me through school. I use Black Dragon viewer to film in, because the light and shadows in it can be awfully pretty, even if you don’t have a great tech set-up. That said, the controls can be hard to get used to, and I definitely walked off my own platform backwards while trying to film Strawberry Singh (aka Linden). It was not my most professional moment!

Sequences like the spinning light saber, I had to animate by hand, frame by frame, so 3 seconds of video took an entire day to edit. But I’m used to working on that timescale, because I come from an animation background, and making a few seconds of film in a day as an animator is a success.

It’s pretty heavily edited. I use AfterEffects to add shadows and rim-lighting and do color grading. It’s a lot quicker to do it all in post rather than fussing with lights in a viewer. I’ve managed to get a few blogger friends to open After Effects instead of Photoshop sometimes. There are a lot of things it does so much quicker.

See much more of Teal’s work on her Flickr. Much thanks to Flickr maven & curator Cajsa for the tip!