ILL Blog

We recently completed a series of machinima animated videos for the San Francisco-based Level Playing Field Institute's Workplace Program that demonstrate the potential power of the animation medium. The program is designed to study how professionals across various demographic groups perceive subtle bias and unfairness in decisions made in their tech workplaces. The larger goal of the study is to help employers effectively interrupt the vicious cycle of biases and barriers and create more fair and productive workplaces.

"The Résumé"

This animated campaign is a component of Level Playing Field’s overall mission. The managers and tech professionals who view each 5-7 minute video become engaged in subtle narratives: the review of résumés for a new hire, a performance evaluation, and a discussion over which employee deserves the single budgeted bonus. Rather than pose answers, the videos attempt to leave viewers with questions about their own decisions and judgments.

Clip from "The Résumés"


At the ILL Clan, we’ve always found narrative story telling to be an effective and efficient way to train, inform and educate people. A narrative naturally absorbs a viewer into the story and can help them to more effectively absorb the overall message.

"Performance Review"

The Cannes Film Festival opens this week and is screening what looks to be an interesting film, shot partially in Second Life. The film, R U There, a Dutch/French production directed by David Verbeek, is about a relationship between a professional gamer and a Taiwanese girl, who attempt to deepen their relationship in the virtual world of Second Life.

Recently we've had the pleasure of working with accomplished machinimist Arella Furman as one of the latest additions to our team.  If you haven't checked out her blog, do yourself a favor and head on over. 

Her latest entry is a great article on Machinima Style. 

Variety reported yesterday that Fox has ordered a TV pilot of machinima animated show "Heel" from machinima.com. Good news for machinima though Variety notes that the "Heel" pilot was ordered by Fox on the strength of the script by Chris Cluess ("The Simpsons," "Mad TV") prior to being produced by Machinima.com. Good news either way and best said by Gamepro "Still, a tangential influence on TV is better than zero influence." Congratulations to machinima.com.

One thing I find invaluable in our productions is a Shot Angle Sheet, created in pre-production. It's sort of like a storyboard but not. On a live action film set, you would have a full crew that includes a cameraman and script supervisor to ensure you get all your angles covered and that they will match up appropriately in an edit. But for us machinimist's, we gotta do that ourselves, and a shot angle sheet helps.

We create our sheet by going in world and setting up the rough shots we're thinking of using: a closeup, medium, medium wide, two shot etc, take stills of those shots and then bring them together in Photoshop or Word. We lay them out side by side so we can get a feel for how the shots could potentially work together in the edit as we cut from one angle to another. Such as from a close up of one character looking camera right, to a close up of the other character who is looking at them camera left.

During this process, we usual end up tweaking the shots a bit and adjusting the eyelines, and shooting new stills until we get a set of shots that we know will work (we'll cover eye lines in a separate post).

You could even go a step further with your stills and bring them into an edit and create animatics, but we find this shot angle sheet works just fine. Once it's time to shoot, we open up the shot angle sheet and use it for our shot reference for the day.

Here's a sheet I worked on recently, for one of our clients, shot with machinimist Ariella Furman. We had two characters sitting at a table in the company cafeteria. We decided to have them both sit on the same side of the table, as they were not eating lunch but working together, reviewing resumes of potential hires. We had a few more shots than what you see here, but for the most part, these were the major shots that needed to match.

ILL Clan Animation Studios is proud to announce that Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, commissioned us to design and produce a completely new direction for their First User Experience, comprised of Welcome Island and Second Life Discovery Island, both of which went live this week.

The purpose of the new user orientation is to provide a pleasurable user experience as well as to simply and effectively teach the essential skills a new user will need to fully enjoy their virtual Second Life experience.  One of Linden Lab’s primary goals for this project is to ensure that the first user experience is a positive one.

“Navigating your avatar in virtual worlds will soon be as commonplace as using social applications and sending emails,” says Kerria Seabrooke, the Lead Designer on the project.  “Our focus was on designing a universal interactive space that utilized spatiality, light play, textures, sounds and graphics to create an environment that impacts the interrelationship between fun and learning.”
 
The purpose of Second Life Discovery Island is to provide an environment where the new user is introduced to the many different aspects of Second Life and to address the question "what now?"

The ILL Clan team's background in both real world design and virtual worlds experience design as seen by the work on the CSI Virtual Crime Fighting Experience made their partnership with Linden Lab a natural one. ILL Clan Studios has previously worked with Linden Lab to produce a series of machinima videos for their recent website edesign, focused on introducing the many exciting aspects of Second Life to potential new users.

Welcome Island First Landing


Welcome Island Fly Lesson


Overview of SL Discovery Island


SL Discovery Island - Shopping Pod Interior

The ILL Clan Team

Kerria Seabrooke
Paul Jannicola
Damien Fate

Jason Crisman
Ryker Beck
Rez Menoptra
Adell Donaghue
Michael Johns
DNA Prototype
Dan Krueger

Our thanks to the AMAZING team at Linden Lab -

Petra Linden
Rhett Linden
JoRoan Linden
Ben Linden
Jeska Linden
Shamiran Linden

With St Patrick's Day coming up, we thought it might be fun to reminisce about the days when voice was brand new in Second Life...with a little Irish music and dancing to boot!

We'll always have a soft spot for The Grid Review, our first Second Life show and one of SL's first news shows.     

Just discovered on Machinima Studios that the Bitfilm Festival, a long time supporting of machinima, has dropped the category from their competition this year. Their press release introduces this years concept; "Make a Film on Money," where they'll be producing a feature film from the winners submissions, a feature whose profits will be shared with the filmmakers.

This news hints at a possible reason for dropping the machinima category as all content must be owned by the filmmaker for the feature film to work as a financial venture. But there is an animated category and given Second Life's non-issue with the traditional IP and engine licensing issues that hamper machinima made from commercial video game's, I hope to see the Second Life machinima community submit in droves.

Call me old-school. Traditional. A post production fuddy-duddy.

Or, just too busy editing to notice.

I made the switch from a decade of editing with the Media100 platform to Final Cut in the Fall of 2007. Like most Media 100 editors, I haven’t looked back, and consumed every bit of FCP knowledge I could get my hands on to ramp up as quickly as possible. In the mad rush to get up to speed on a new (to me) editing platform and jump right into pending projects, I neglected some details that perhaps a new editor with more time on his or her hands would have uncovered: Apple Motion templates were one of them.

Most editors do any sort of heavy effect work outside of their main editing software, and After Effects has always been my go-to app for effects/compositing. I had heard of Apple’s Motion, of course, but I had not taken the time to learn what I thought was an After Effects clone.

While it does do a lot of things similar to After Effects, Motion also has its own strengths (and weaknesses!). The feature that really gets me excited, though, is its ability to interface with Final Cut through the use of Motion Templates. Having been editing blindly through deadlines since I began with FCP, it has taken me a few years to stumble upon this miracle time saver.

Once a Motion Template is created within Motion (or purchased from online stock media-type sites), it can be used within Final Cut as a “drop zone” for video clips in your FCP project. Operating just like the drop zones in DVD Studio Pro’s menu templates, these drop zones allow you to quickly and easily swap out the video media in a complex fx sequence without hopping back to the fx application.

This pic displays the tell-tale "drop zone" graphic inviting the editor to drop in a piece of footage in the viewer on the left. In the canvas you can see where the clip will go, within a slowly rotating faux-web page:
 
      

Once the video clip is dropped into the Motion Template, all of the parameters and fx that you applied to a drop zone placeholder in Motion are instantly applied to the “dropped” clip within Final Cut. For a project that requires the same fx used multiple times with different video sources, this procedure literally saves hours over having to hop back and forth between After Effects and Final Cut. Once the template is built, swapping out the video clip is simple, and you can go back to Motion to edit the template if necessary – and then when the sequence is rendered back in FCP, everything is updated instantly.

Although Motion is similar enough to After Effects that I was able to stumble through it to make the template I needed, a thorough knowledge of the software will be necessary to really take advantage of its particle systems and other powerful features.I plan to do that just as soon as I find that elusive spare time, but in the meantime I’ll continue to use Motion Templates to streamline my workflow.

Ready to get started?  Here is a link to a great tutorial on creating your own Motion templates.

Today, Linden Lab released viewer 2.0 as a beta.  Users who wish to access the grid with the next gen of Linden technology can download it here

Some of the new items include a side panel for frequently used features and integrated web-based media, (which totally rocks, btw!)

You can run the new viewer on the same machine as your current 1.23 viewer too, so now is a great time to download it and get to know your new SL interface a little better. 

Here is Linden's blog post on the subject. 

With the release, Linden has also created this shiort intro film which explains the new features. Produced by Pooky Amsterdam.

Don’t miss the exciting MaMachinima International Festival 2010 this Saturday!

The festival was created by Chantal Harvey and her team and features over 50 films
from machinima filmmakers from around the globe. It's a seven hour machinima marathon
held in Second Life and screened in Amsterdam. 

For more information visit the MMIF website

MMIF 2010 ARTISTS:
Gala Charron – Ogogoro - Lainy Voom – Draxtor Despres – Bryn Oh - Rohan
Fermi – Toxic Menges – Tara Yeats – Phaylen Fairchild – Pooky Amsterdam
& Russell (Rosco) Boyd – Poid Mahovlich – CodeWarrior Carling – Evie
Fairchild – Graham Miami – Kronos Kirkorian – Osprey Therian – Chaffro
Schoonmaker - SaveMe Oh - Dulci Parx – Chatnoir Studios – Paisley Beebe –
Rysan Fall – Sol Bartz (phil Rice) – Rocksea Renegade – Cisko Vandeverre –
Nitwacket (Pyewacket Bellman) – Chantal Harvey – Lowe Runo – Pia Klaar – Al
Peretz – Halden Beaumont – Kolor Fall – Binary Quandry – spyVspy Aeon –
Animatechnica – Miles Eleventhauer – Lizsolo Mathilde – Delgado Cinquetti –
L1aura Loire – Iono Allen – Pyewacket Kazyanenko – Fort Knight – Luca
Lisci – Larkworthy Antfarm – Beans Canning - Gtoon Jun – Tutsy Navarathna
– Hadji Ling – Colemarie Soleil – Xineohp Guisse – Lorin Tone – Ian
Friar – Suzy Yue – Claus Uriza / Emily Hifeng – Meta Lord, and others.

MMIF 2010 HOSTS:
Blue Linden, Toxic Menges, Pooky Amsterdam, Draxtor Despres, Chantal
Harvey, Poid Mahovlich, Paisley Beebe, Evie Fairchild, CodeWarrior Carling,
Lauren Weyland, Phaylen Fairchild, Starshine Halasy and others.

MMIF 2010 TIMES:
Saturday 20th of February
19:00 CET (= SL 10 am PST) – DOORS OPEN
20:00 CET (= SL 11 am PST) – Opening ceremony + Machinima film screenings
03:00 CET (= SL 6 pm PST) – THE END + After party online in SL

PHYSICAL LOCATION:
PLANETART Medialab Artspace
Wibautstraat 150
1091 GR Amsterdam (NL)

VIRTUAL LOCATION:
MMIF 1, 2, 3, 4
Second Life®
Teleport links via http://live.MMIF.org