…you ought to be in movies
…so Cybernauts will need to present their final contributions, and one format will be in-world machinima, so I set about thinking about how to best teach how to do this.
I have fond (if wildly inaccurate) memories of the old clackety film projectors we had when I was in school, so set about modelling one in Wings3D
Model Work
While I was there, I also made a “wall” that is to be used as a sort of noticeboard on which I post tutorials and how-to’s. I thought the filmstrip metaphor would be a useful one so used that – I suspect however, our cybernauts have NEVER even seen actual film (that flimsy semi-transparent media we used to entrust our visual records to) – good or bad I do not know. I am not sure how I feel about the move to entirely digital records, particularly of things that are important – I guess they will never be accidentally deleted or become corrupt, hey?
With assets in-hand, I entered the world, set up an area in the tutorial zone, wired it to be the next stop in the guided tour and began decorating it with film-making resources
Entry to Film School
I popped the projector on a pedestal (where it belongs :P) and began animating and lighting it – the reels move at different speeds, as they did in real life, and I found a rather nice animated test pattern, and fashioned a transparent flickery light beam to add to the effect. Surrounding this I set about arranging display panels.
Projector, beam and screen (showing test pattern)
The aim was to “keep it simple, stupid”. Fortunately the in-world video capture system is pretty simple actually, so I aimed to show budding Spielbergs how to get to it, how to drive it and what the settings mean, briefly.
Setup explanation
As well as how to fire up the recorder, I thought it relevant to introduce some film language as well – tilt/pan, dolly/truck are all important – we do them without thinking but I thought that surfacing the terms explicitly the kids could have much better discussions when planning their movies.
Some film language
Rather than just post static resources, I thought a little meta-machinima was in order (machinima about making machinima) – check it out
Quite happy with the resultant tutorial – will it work with the punters – no idea – I guess we will find out.
I am not sure if I should also post info on storyboarding to formalise their planning – certainly the productions will be better quality if they are planned but i am not sure – what do you think?
Machinimatic …
…now the 3D world can be a very powerful and constructionist (and constructivist) place to get creative people working in, but generally “what happens in-world, stays in-world” … until now.
While digging around in the Activeworlds client (the program that provides you with access to the world) settings, I came across an “Addin” that is a scene grabber.
3D Scene Grabber
…you can use it to capture world action in WMV movie format, with sound, at varying sample/frame rates, with some control over the frame size. It got me thinking as to what we could do with that facility.
Now I have not done much “machinima” (or more correctly, not done very much in the way of digital video at all really, yes I know I must be a philistine). From my readings on Machinema, it is essentially movie making using game engines, but it seems to me that we could easily do that here.
As the worlds we are building are constructionist, we could get kids to make sets, lights, our avatars could wear costumes as actors who could act out a story whilst someone else could film it. Nice.
Up until now I had assumed it was not possible to use this movie footage in-world. Laaaaate saturday night I stumbled across a poorly documented feature of SIGN objects (yes, those things that traditionally display TEXT messages) as opposed to PICTURE objects (which are designed to display graphics … go figure).
You can spawn a MOVIE PLAYER (well, in truth it is an embedded Windows Media Player window on a SIGN object, and stream your movie on it, in world, on demand.
Now to me this is pretty exciting, so I set about testing it. I had some speech-bubble signs, placed them opposite a line of seats (a drive in movie of sorts, well, “fly in” more accurately) and had a play with some WMVs sourced from Google – they worked a treat.
3 screens, on demand
…sure there is some delay with downloading, as the player buffers enough to play, but we get movies, with sound, in-world. Excitingly, you can have multiple streams independently playing for each person, there is “3D sound” which is directional – it emanates from the sign in much the same way that a sound or noise does, there is some control over captioning and start/stop, loop etc.
So I recorded a walk around, uploaded the resultant WMV file, embedded it using the code
create sign; activate media url=http://myworld.eq.edu.au/media/WonkoTestMovie1.wmv “click to load movie”
and it worked a treat. In the morning, i got a test pleb (thanks Kye1) to check they too could see the movie (thinking it might just be some wierd admin trick – there are a few of those) and he was also able to see the movie – interestingly it is not streamed synchronously to all users – while he was watching, I had no clue he was, except his avatar was stationary for a while.
So, after asking him for permission, we staged a 2 person, one bot (will introduce you to my pet bot in another posting) movie, filmed it and posted it as well:
wonkoFILM starring Kye1 and wonkoBOT
Kye1 was beside himself (literally) when the movie loaded in-world with him – I can see wonderful potential with this … you know what would be perfect – if the new iShare service the learning Place are about to launch lets the kids upload their movies in a way that can be seen by an in-world player – I can imagine it now – film nights where people BYO a film, virtual film studios, film clubs …
…what do you think?
