My First SL Filmmaking

I was bored today. I had been wandering around the grid for about an hour. It sounds hard to get bored in Second Life but it can happen. So I went to the forums and watched some movies that people had made. Which gave me an idea. I decided that I wanted to film a movie. So I went into Cordova and shouted "Does anyone want to film a car chase movie!" I have no idea where the car chase idea came from. Luckily for me, Phil Mars yelled back "Yeah!"

I build a platform and Phil and I sat on it. I raised it to a high 400 meters and starting building some floors. I build several roads for the set as Phil rezzed buildings. After we had the town built, we furnished it with manhole covers, plants, trash. trafic cones, and signs. Midway through the construction, Nicole Burke flew into our set. We explained our project and invited her to help.

Filming in SL is a camera man's worst nightmare. The frame rates are low, actors' clients crash, lag seizes vehicles. Somehow we managed to pull off 12 shots for a total of 750 megabytes of disk space.

All that is left to do on the project is the editing and the audio effects. The Final Cut Pro project has already been created, so it is progressing. I plan to have the film done in a week.

The process of creating this film prompted me to consiter creating a group for filmmakers in Second Life. You can read about it on the SL forums.