Random Note about Filmmaking and New Media Form

dctvNY - documentary video
MoMA - elastic mind

CGI film

Journey to the Center of the Earth (comic con, real D)

Choi Fei's Second Life Project

RMB City
China Tracy

i.Mirror

Producer's Note III - production plan

Machinima

Book Resources:

What a Producer Does?

Nickelodeon Cartoons

The Art of Howl's Moving Castle

50 Robots to Draw & A Giant

Sci-fi Film Posters

Exploring Storyboarding

Interactive Puppetry

An interactive puppeteering device shown at Eyebeam...

Invisible Threads - performance

Invisible Threads, a mixed reality performance, by artists Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg investigates the idea of telematic manufacturing by merging live virtual performance with real-world sales presentation and assembly workshop.

[Photo]
The owners of Double Happiness Jeans set up their store at Eyebeam on Thursday evening. Stephanie, standing by a display rack of designer jeans samples, was talking to potential customers. Jeff assisted customers to place orders at a computer station which connected to the virtual factory of Double Happiness Jeans in Second Life and streamed live event at Eyebeam. Eight "workers", coming from several countries around the world, were at presence. For getting paid 200 Lindens an hour (about 90 cents), the workers waited at the assembly line, sitting at their computer screens, to perform their avatars once they received a cue from the voice chat to produce the jeans. This was the acting part.

I browsed through the product catalog. The jeans costs around 40 dollars. Susan from Eyebeam ordered a pair of My Pants. A image of the jeans was generated by workers in virtual factory, through a portal and server sending instructions to open the pattern in Photoshop on the same computer and print on cotton fabric via a large-format printer. After simple assembly – cutting, glue gun and stitching, a real-world commodity was created.



This mix of real-world and virtual economy seems to reflect on the similar working conditions of many remote jobs. While online interface opens more opportunities for workers of all kinds and all experience levels, even educational institutions would often offer lower compensation to a professor teaching online course than course on campus.

However, Double Happiness Jeans offers their workers a plot of virtual land to build their own home and provides spaces for recreational activities in-world and social networking. I am not sure if the stated mission of Double Happiness Jeans to produces jeans for profit is part of the mixed reality.

But the frustration to be able to find a suitable place and afford monthly land cost for such project is pretty real.

Invisible Threads - machinima

(This is one of the Mixed Reality Events at Eyebeam.)

Double Happiness Jeans by artists Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg

Invisible Threads by machinimatographer Annie Ok is both a project documentary and promotional film.

The 8-minute machinima uses the format of how-to videos and plays "10 Simple Steps to your very own Virtual Sweatshop with Telematic Manufacturing". How-to videos can be fun to watch. The pace, music, and voice over keep overall tone of this film quite upbeat and maybe suggests a hint of irony to the difficult conditions of sweatshop labors.

Background tech info:

In order to make Double Happiness Jeans virtual factory to process live orders from customers in real world, Jeff spent a long time writing a piece of code that sends instructions from SL portal to the server then to Photoshop (using extension script) on the same computer presenting the virtual factory to print out selected patterns via industrial printer.

Annie offered some insights for machinima. The list includes – speech gesture (using voice chat to activate gesture animation) can be found in the inventory folder for real-time interaction needs, etc.

Atmosphere Rendering

Winglight

Effect rendering varies depending on graphic cards and system configurations.

Setting is saved on computer HD not inventory.

Share Objects

When working collectively side by side, allowing friends to modify your objects on Contacts menu is good enough.

But it does not work for objects sent over from inventory dropoff. Be sure to always change the object to can modify and copy on the Create object menu.

A trick to get a bunch of objects all become can modify and copy... Link all the objects and change setting. Vola! Even after unlinking them, the objects will all be can modify and copy. Each object's name (and probably other settings as well) can maintain its individuality and won't get converted.

Share with group on Create menu is another setting yet to be tested...

Producer's Note II - machinima course

Team

Industrial team works in a different dynamic from academic collaboration. Their work flow is designed to maximize the use of time and resources of each individual team member. Multiple projects will be assigned, and specialized tasks are distributed to corresponding skilled professionals. When I was talking to the 3D artist from one of the Nickelodeon studios in New York City, she mentioned to me that she has less chance working on various aspects of the animation production. On her team of 13 to 14 people, she mainly works on render pass based on the shot list the production assistant provided to everyone when others worked on background texture, lighting, 3D car animation in Maya and 2D characters animation in Flash, composite in After Effects, etc. based on the 3D models made by another team in India.

However as a course, collaboration is specific to a learning environment instead of a working environment. Even though the current stage of the machinima project requires quite a lot of production time, the instruction needs to be designed to empower participating students to contribute their expertise and perspectives to the project in both levels as an art film (results derived from iterative process of experiments and discussions), and as an innovative media and technology research (providing chances for engagement). At the same time, the guidance needs to create a focus and scope and set explicit goals and milestones. So at the end of the course, students may reflect upon this experience to further develop themselves within the field of design & technology.

Precedents/References:
Design & Education, Karen Sideman
(design questions, principles of empowered learning)
Media Lab, MIT - "learning by doing"
(the use of laboratory instruction)

Course Info
Timeline - 15 meetings
Design, storyboard, animatic - 2 weeks
Modeling, texture, lighting - 2 weeks
Animation - 2 weeks
Scripting avatar behaviors, particle effects, windlight - 2 weeks
Camera, lighting tool, avatar controller - 2 weeks
Shooting - 2 weeks
Post-production, presentations - 2 weeks
Screening - last week

Specialty Professionals:

3D Maya Artist - ShuChen Lin

Linden Scripting Language (LSL)

Scripted behaviors: motion and interactivity... new mono
* animated sculpty faces
* internal face animations

Producer's Note I - SL preparation

Budget

We'll have two major categories of expenses. In addition to Parson's Mac Lab facility, we may need to leave 1/3 of budget for other hardware and software purchases. Another 2/3 can be used toward SL land rental and tools.

Miscellaneous

How to create Groups in SL

(Basic Account can create groups)

The goal to create a group is that the production/research team will be able to work on the set collectively, sharing and editing objects created.

Land Rental & Criteria

Machinima Set Up

Machinima Set up

Hardware
Cable or DSL connection
2 - 3 External Hard Drives (200GB for making 5 minute movie)
(FireWire 400/800 or High Speed USB 2.0)
Mac Optimized for 3D online game

Software
Second Life Client (free download, accessing 3D online virtual world)
Maya (for modeling sculpty and prims with plugin, texturing, exporting, and animating avatar)
QAvimator (free, for animating avatar)
Quicktime Pro
Final Cut Pro
After Effects
Photoshop
Snapz Pro X (Mac, free trail, real time video capturing tool) / FRAPS (Windows)

Supplemental Software
Ploopp SL (free, for sculpty, 2D painting modeling method)

Audacity (free, sound editing)
Reallusion CrazyTalk & iClone (free trail, Windows only, for lip-sync, facial animation & 3D character animation)

Optional Software
Blender (free, for modeling sculpty and prims, baking textures, exporting, animating avatar, and editing videos, interface is quite complicated, Maya is an equivalent software to Blender)
Lightwave (for sculpty)
Wings 3D (free, for sculpty, not sure if include built-in texture baking)

Optional Equipment
Projector
3DConnexion Space Navigator
(use with Flycam in SL)
Machinima Camera/Lighting Tools
(either free or cost Linden$ in SL / SL Exchange)

Land Search

All right, so I decided to look into the land options that Linden Lab provides for educational purposes. Unfortunately they only offer specials for institutions and organizations that purchase private island, which is not what we need.

Let's deal with real estate in world. We can either buy or rent without owning a Premium Account. Based on previously established criteria, our best bet is to rent a plot of land in private new regions (not mainland) running on Class 5 servers. Class 5 sims have better LSL (Linden Scripting Language) performance. In addition to the new Simulator Havok 4, it should be an exciting news.

2048 m2 (468 prims) - 4096 m2 (937 prims)

Options:

Campus Land "Scholarship" gives 1 acre of land (4096 sqm, 937 prims) free for the duration of the class

Kahakai 4096 sqm for rent L$7500 ($28)/mo (all occupied now)

GavenRezDistrict medium parcel 2048 sqm (702 prims) for rent 5000L/mo (no edit terrain)

Lukanida Alt-Zoom Theater and Sandbox dedicated for machinima purposes (BuhBuhCuh Fairchild a.k.a. Ben Linden & Alt-Zoom Studios) (no terraform, trees & grass)

Land Purchase Criteria

Criteria for evaluating land purchase for Machinima Project:

1. What kind of Sim is it? Is the sim lag free?
2. What is the parcel size that we will need for a small build and 10 users? (512 m2 is the smallest plot.)
3. How many Prims are allowed on the parcel? (This is a separate land use fee also known as Tier Fee.)
4. Does the sim have a dedicated server? Who are our neighbors in the same grid because we'll be sharing server resources? Or does the sim specify the amount of script lag/m2?
5. Who's the sim owner? Only sim owner has the access to Region tools to trouble shoot lag. How they are charging for the sale fee and maintenance fee?

The complete ownership of a grid space (a region also know as island) costs $1675. The average price per square meters for an island is about 40/m2 at auction. But there's only large parcel on sale. Linden has banned First Land program that allows Premium account holder to purchase a 512 m2 plot at L$1/m2. We either have to purchase from Land Auction or other Residents. This is very much a bad news because we will have to spend more energy and time to figure what and where to buy. When I saw that ebay icon, I went a-ha. It totally signals that Linden wants to promote the bidding culture and reinforce the current "free market".

See pricing list.