WATCH: Teal's Amazing New Machinima Devoted to Crack Den, the Second Life-Based Urban Roleplay MMO With a Deep & Detailed Story

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Here’s the latest luminously gobsmacking Second Life machinima from Teal Aurelia (first profiled here) and this time, it’s seriously epic.

It also happens to be an ad for an SL-based brand: In this case, Crack Den, the long-running urban roleplay mini-MMO, and Teal’s precise visuals allude to the game’s detailed backstory right from the start: 

“I had to do a ton of research about Crack Den because I’d never roleplayed there, and the more I read, the more annoyed I was that I hadn’t known the scale of its worldbuilding sooner,” as Teal teals me.

So instead of shooting random locations in the game world which spans 10 sims — i.e. over 1.5 square miles / 2.5km — she focused on its larger narrative:

“This is a ten sim fictional world rising out of Hurricane Katrina [where] players can be anything. I wanted a video with more characters than I’d ever attempted to film before, and none of them would be definitively good or bad; they’re just surviving.” (And surviving oh so sexily.)

Crack Den is managed by lead developer Nadir Taov — who I hope to chat with soon — and who gave Teal broad creative latitude on the machinima:

“He gave me a really well-considered creative brief that laid out the kind of objectives and tone he had for the video. It included links to references — such as a recent GTA VI trailer — but he was also really clear that he was hiring me with full creative freedom.” (Personally I think it compares very favorably to the recent GTA VI trailer, which was surely created for many millions of dollars more than this.)

During the creative process, Teal learned some surprising things about Crack Den, beginning with the very name:

“[It] gave me a lot of misconceptions. I imagined a small scrap of land but it’s several cities and a university campus. I imagined a lot of sex and drugs – and there certainly are adult themes – but there are also cafes and game arcades, and you can attend classes or get a job.

“The roleplay community isn’t limited to being in-world either; a lot of citizens have social-media accounts for their characters, which I hadn’t really seen before. A community this complex couldn’t work without Nadir’s genius-level professionalism in overseeing it.

“But the most surprising thing to me was the story. This is not a city of people who are bitter and bruised for no reason, and the effort that went into creating the world is what made me want to film it.”

So, yes, I plan on writing about more about Crack Den, since this depth surprises me too.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most breathtaking images from Teal’s video weren’t shot directly in Crack Den:

“You should know me well enough to guess that it’s edited in post,” she tells me laughing, referring to the wildly tumbling bus at the beginning. “It definitely could’ve been done with physics or scripts in-world, but if I have any excuse to create something in Nuke or After Effects, I will.”

Watch Teal’s behind the scenes video above! And if you’re a Crack Den denizen yourself, please share your own experiences as a seriously hot avatar surviving in the blasted remains of an alternate world post-Katrina world.

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