Today we are going to have a workshop on making machinima (machine+cinema). We'll do a variation on the activity I do in my Language of Film course, which is to go into class, improvise a scene/short film in silent film style (so there is no pesky sound to record/edit/match in editing) with the props at hand, film it during class, and edit it later using our laptops. We'll go into Second Life, and instead of emptying our backpacks and pockets for props, look in our inventories. Instead of using the classroom and hallway for the set, we'll pick a sim in SL. Like in the actual world class film shoot, we'll be the actors, and can take turns (on my computer rather than through my camera) shooting.
I am very curious to see how this goes, whether it takes longer to do in SL (this is my hunch), because no one ever crashes in the classroom, or at least hasn't yet, and pulling a banana out of a backpack does not take any time to rez, or place, etc. BUT I have yet to see anyone fly in the Film Scoring hallway or make the moviola dance.
We can also think about the kino-eye, what Dziga Vertov hoped for, and what we can so easily do in making our machinima on our laptop computers. Theoretically, we could each shoot our own version simultaneously as we acted in them . . . would we gain anything from that? What?
