The Time has passed for talks
The Bedazzle Studios has directed a movie entirely shooted inside Second Life. It all started from Eric Call, senior artist at Linden Lab, that came across the story of Silver Bells and Golden Spurs in a book of cowboy poetry several years ago, then he decided to shoot it. He started realizing a screen play adaptation and creating some of the stanza of the film, but it was too big to realize it alone. One day one of Linden Lab’s engineers demoed a QuickTime movie applied to an avatar face mesh and Eric realized that he could try to shoot his cowboy movie using this new Second Life’s feature.
So it started the making of the first movie shooted inside Second Life. Eric started the research phase made of visits to several mining and ghost towns in the Sierra Nevada to gather reference material and textures for the production and readings of books and surfingon the Internet to find images of the right buildings, clothing and props.
Then he needed some help and he find it by the Bedazzle Studios artists for recreation of the film.
On the “making page” of the film Eric Call explains deeply all the process, talking also about the research goals that he saw during the production phase that could serve as a proof of concept for several features, particularly speech emulation.
Also he talks about the acting of the avatars: “All of the actors were given a library of character animations they could manipulate through control scripts, and I directed them to perform specific actions during video capture. This allowed them some creative freedom so they could personalize their character, and at the same time assured me that I’d get the kind of actions I wanted.”
And about the goals: “Uncovering bugs, developing techniques for building and texturing, and revealing areas for improvement are just a few of the benefits to Linden Lab. Bells and Spurs sets new goals for quality and creativity in resident creations. It promotes a level of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that will empower residents to use more of Second Life’s capabilities.”
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Luca @ July 11, 2007