Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Second Life) is professor of cultural studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, where she
teaches visual culture and interactive media studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and new media artist
who explores the making of visual meaning in twentieth- and twenty-irst-century culture in her internation-
ally recognized books, articles, and creative digital media. Included are three images from her works: “Mirror
People” (top left), “Toggle” (top right), and “Transformations” (second row, left). All of these machinima are
concerned with the virtual/physical world dichotomy and the relection of ourselves in the virtual avatar.
Below that in the lower half of Figure 16.2 is the work of Professor Sarah Higley (Hypatia Pickens in Second
Life). Dr. Higley is an award-winning machinimatographer who is a professor of medieval studies, ilm, and
cultural studies at the University of Rochester, New York. Her interests center around northern medieval
languages, Old English, Middle English, Middle Welsh, and ilm courses (including machinima). She is uti-
lizing virtual worlds to explore the creation of new media forms. In the lower section are three images from
her work: “Love Prayer” (top right and lower right) and “Cloud” (left).
Machinima has arrived as an art form in its own right. The interface for making movies in Second Life
has been part of the Second Life viewer for years, but now with accelerated graphics cards and large-capacity
storage devices, the tools for sophisticated movie making are available. Virtual world viewers like Firestorm
have upgraded the capacity to provide even faster frame rates for smoother video capture, as well as depth of
ield (DOF) and variable shadow settings.
In the realm of art-based machinima, a couple of notable standouts are Bryn Oh and tutsy NAvArAthnA.
Bryn Oh designs and builds intricate virtual environments based on a loose diary of her experiences, which
incorporate many aspects of technology and fantasy. She then creates machinima from the stories within
that environment. Machinimatographer tutsy NAvArAthnA works in the surreal. His machinima “The Last
Syllable of Recorded Time” won irst place in the 2011 University of Western Australia's hugely popular
machinima competition. In Figure 16.3, you will see screenshots from their work.
There is also some exciting machinima being done by the fashion photographers in virtual worlds.
In Figure 16.4 are some images from Tikaf Viper, a noted fashion photographer and machinimatographer in
Second Life.
16.2
DEFINING YOUR NARRATIVE AND PRESENTATION STYLE
The Latin word
camera
translates as “chamber” or “room.” Therefore, you may take the term
irst-person
camera
to mean the metaphorical “room” or “point of view” from which you observe a world, real or vir-
tual. If you were outside your body, looking at yourself and everyone else around, you would be using a
“third-person camera” or point of view. These perspectives transition constantly from very personal up-close
inspections to wide vistas full of many visual elements as you focus your virtual camera on the environment
around you. Your interpretations become apparent to other observers when you record these observations
and put them up on a screen as a machinima. Naturally, these visual observations are often accompanied
by words of narrative, as evidenced by the numerous blogs that describe the experience of virtual worlds or
“tell the story.” Figure 16.5 shows a diagram of some of the interconnecting elements of your experience in
a virtual world and the modes of storytelling. Essentially, there are two ways to present a story: You can talk
about it (diegesis) or you can show it (mimesis). Both of these are going on simultaneously in most of the
media produced today. In the center is your subjective experience. You see the visual elements in a virtual
world as you observe the architecture, landscape and cultural design, characters of other avatars around you,
and so on. You hear the narrative backstory when the avatars are role-playing, presenting a story, or even
chatting in instant messaging (IM) or local chat. All of this contributes to your temporal and spatial experi-
ences in a virtual world, as well as the various diegetic and nondiegetic elements that enter your awareness.
