Machinimation

Had another meeting in Second Life with Sara/Cory the other day and a guy called Makiao (his second life name), who is a wiz with all the scripting and more advanced stuff. I've got some great pictures which I'll post soon - they're on another computer.

As I said in a previous post, I'm thinking of doing some machinima of my own once Ricard's project is finished - I can't wait to be able to tell you more about it, but it's all under wraps currently until it's launched. We had a discussion the other day about second life/machinima as a film set, and it's quite interesting from an animation point of view. Because it's real time, you are able to shoot/reshoot/set up/try different things on stage. - With animation, you painstakingly work out exactly each shot and make it just like that, there's really not much room for the happy accident. I realise I'm generalising here, but I'm thinking of my own experiences as an animator.

I've been thinking a lot about how to use actors in animation, to pull out the nuances of how an actor not only speaks, but moves and emotes - I'd like to look at devising with actors to make cartoons. I find scriptwriting quite difficult in isolation - well, not difficult as such, but it's not so lively. In live action, there is a long tradition of improvisation being used to block scenes and pull out new ideas - Steven Sheil and Chris Cooke recently spent two weeks workshopping with actors to tighten up a script for Chris' road movie. As well as getting some top celeb gossip (I'm not sure if I can write about it - I'll ask Chris how much trouble it will cause!), they got some good stuff.

When I was at University, doing lots of live art/performance work, I found devising with a group to be a really good way of building a project, and exciting because it doesn't always work, and requires really hard thinking and listening/responding. In thinking about ways to devise for animation, the live art approach started to reappear - I think because Live Art and animation share some common points - and some extremely differing ones -

Why Cartoons and Live Art are similar:
Character/Performer as Statement.
Play with narrative/timeline.
Play with continuity.
Non-naturalistic staging.

Why they're not:
Anything can happen in either. - Except in animation, you've already thought of that ages ago.

I really like the idea of the spontaneous gesture in animation, or something that gets to the honesty of the actor/character - possibly subconciously, most likely accidentally.

I realise that's a really short and probably not informative description of the idea, but I'm writing about it for my MA and will post a full version soon.

Anyway, maybe machinima is a way to do it - It's live, it's got real time cameras, shots can be set up again and again, and I get to say 'Can we try that again, this time with feeling' - I'm going to build an avatar that looks like one of those old style movie directors with plus 4's, a beret and a monocle! i've got a few ideas for films floating around at the moment, and after i've finished ricard's film, i think i'm gonna have a go. I've built a whole wardrobe of nice outfits, and hopefully with some linden scripting skills i'll be able to make some good stuff. i can see that although second life is fairly limited at the moment, as in we are still a long way off from pixar or peter jackson style cgi, it will only get better - and films will get much more sophisticated. How long till we see the first game engine made cinema release or telly programme? - I'm sure it won't be too long, or even with us already, and I've just not seen it.

Some trivia: currently listening to Old Crow Medicine Show, Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, and Be Good Tanyas (always listening to the Be Good Tanyas)