This interview with long-term residen Eggy Lippmann was made a while back, after the SLDEVU in London in December 2006. We talked about the past and future of Second Life and also mentioned the opportunities and problems of an open source client (which wasn’t released back then but was talked about at the SLDEVU event).
[Click here to download the Quicktime version]
(produced by COM.lounge TV)
So the new lighting system has arrived and it looks great. Look at this photo or click on the next one to start a little video of mine which I did at the wedding of Walker and Destroy, what a nice couple 🙂
Click here to play the video
(this is from my german blog over at http://mrtopf.de, btw)
More information about the new viewer and lighting system is on the official Linden Lab blog and you can download it here.
And here’s a little video from last year 🙂
(click to watch)
Some weeks ago I heard the first time about a thing called the Relay For Life and it’s Second Life part. Back then I did not know anything about it and it seemed very hard for me to find any information about the SL part online. Thus I kept asking people and now I know and I think it’s time to write it down for all the other people out there who wonder what it is.
What is the Relay For Life
The Relay For Life (RFL) is an annual event held by the American Cancer Society for raising awareness and money for the fight against cancer. The main idea behind it is “to have members of teams continuously walking, running or rolling around
a track for 12 or 24 hours, to honor those who are surviving cancer, those who have died from it, and the efforts of all who fight it”.
And last year and this year the same event is held in the virtual world of Second Life, organized by Jade Lily.
Relay For Life in Second Life
In Second Life there will also be teams competing in a friendly manner to do the most fundraising. They are holding their own events (I reported about the Dominus auction) before the main RFL event in order to raise money and they are placing RFL donation kiosks all over Second Life to which you can donate.
At the main event their job is it to run around a track which is layed out on 12 sims for 24 hours. People (YOU!) are supposed to come there and cheer them and to donate money in the luminaires which are placed around the whole track. Residents from all over Second Life are busy right now to fill the 12 sims with buildings representing the whole world. Moreover there will be concerts and other events (more details will be posted later) during that day so make sure you attend and have some fun!
And here’s that video I created as my contribution to the event: Watch the Video.
I just submitted it to the alt-zoom take5 festival and any prize money which might come out of it will go to the Relay For Life.
The video contains music by Ash Verjee, provided by the Podshow Podsafe Music Network.
Update July, 22: There is another video now available announcing the start and containing more footage of the finished builds.
Technorati Tags: secondlife, taotakashi, rfl, relay for life, event, videoblog, video, cancer, virtualworld, american cancer society
Michael Verdi, also known in Second Life as Aren Mandala has a cool new video blog up which is called When We Were Robots. It’s about, yes, Robots 🙂
For the first episode he actually asked me if I want to be an actor in it and I said YES! 🙂 So I ended up playing myself and interviewing two robots about their plans and background.
So here’s the video:
Be aware though that although my intro is coming there it’s actually mostly made by Aren Mandala (including the script).
Looking forward to episode 2!
Technorati Tags: secondlife, aren mandala, tao takashi, vlog, machinima, video blog, robots, virtual world, 3d, second life
I just discovered a nice new video podcast ready for your iPod: Secrets of Second Life by Franklin McMahon.
It seems to be aimed for the new resident exploring the world and wondering how it works. So this podcast e.g gives tips on how to find your friends or how to adjust your preferences.
IMHO something which is really needed for new residents. Explaining it via Video makes quite some sense and I hope that he keeps it up and that new residents actually find it 🙂
And we need more of that, so all you out there, press RECORD and start your own video podcast!
Technorati Tags: 3d, blogs, media, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi
Some of you might have noticed and some of you might even have attended! There’s a new show out there called “Late Night with Eggy Lippmann”. It’s a revival of the old show by Darwin Appleby. It happens at the Afton Lodge in the Afton sim and will feature different guests in each show. Think sort of Conan O’Brien.
Eggy asked me to film the show and so I did. And right now the third part of the first episode will be put online. Find these shows at the blog to the show!
Goals for the video
Eggy had initially the following goal: Record the show for historic purposes so people can watch them in, well, 10 years from now and see what was going on back then. The same would be cool today if we’d be able to watch the first primitar entering the world 😉
So he approached me to help him with it.
In the following discussion we added some more goals:
Of course not everything did work out for the first show so e.g. it was longer than 30 minutes and you cannot really split it into a separate part for each guest. Still we tried to do the 3 parts things although the second one is longer now.
But a bit more about the technical details maybe.
Camera angles
I’ve setup a little camera system with predefined camera angles using the new camera functions in LSL. I basically placed objects where I wanted the camera and focus to be and recorded them with a hotkey. So I have angles now for close-ups for all guests and Eggy and a total of all the guests. Later I will also add an angle for the audience. I created gestures for switching and put them onto hotkeys so I can quickly switch between them when recording. I will improve on that later to store these settings on a notecard instead of script memory where it’s easily lost. Some dolly shots for the audience might also be cool, I just wonder how complicated it might be to get these working as changing the cam position or focus via the camera function does not trigger the position or focus lag but switches directly. For the normal cuts that’s ok but it means that dolly shots are not possible with it.
Applause and other sounds
We wanted to have some sound like applause and laughter. On the first show time for doing much wasn’t available anymore but I want to improve on the next show. Basically my goal is to have a HUD for Eggy where he can trigger the effects which are located in objects close to my camera. Not a big deal but you still need a little time for it (and sounds ;-). So right now we only had 1 applause but next time we hopefully have more. That way you don’t need to add that later in post production
UI issues
As people were intended to do that via chat and not voice we needed to have the chat visible. So this means that we cannot disable the UI for recording as chat would be invisible, too. IMs were also a problem as you cannot be in busy mode for that as well. So I got an alt and did it with him. Moreover I selected the big chat font, disabled Music and Video to get rid of the boxes, switched off the toolbar and chat line and that’s it basically. In post production I still was cutting the Menu line away though but that’s a preset now.
Lighting
For making video nicer I switched to Midnight and put some lights into the scene close to the guests and Eggy to make the video look better. That’s always a good idea if you don’t want to spend much time in post production to make things look better.
Intro
Of course a late night show should have a fitting intro. So I went to Midnight City and did a few photos there to use that. My original plan was to do some more video shooting at places with certain architecture in SL but I didn’t had time for that. So I will improve later on it. I will make the intro available to other people who want to record one show later.
Compression
As we mainly have chat and no big action except some shots we can go with a very low framerate and indeed I used 10 fps for that. This also increases processing speed quite a lot in post production. For the rest I used the usual settings as can be read in freevlog.org.
Things to work on
Some issues I’ve pointed out above but there’s more. Like it’s still not very interesting sometimes to watch people type while waiting for the actual sentence. But in order to keep typing times small it would mean to do cutting in post production. This again might be a time consuming process in order to find the right spots. So I wonder if we can come up with some sort of marking mechanism during recording to point out where to cut. So some research might be necessary here.
Then I need more people to film it. So if you are willing to help please contact me. There’s not much to know, you will get the camera system and instructions on how to record and compress it later. I will also do the first ones together so I can notice where problems might arise in the process.
So that’s my little Late Night report. Attached are some photos from the first event. Look out for the next event which might even happen during the birthday party celebrations.
Technorati Tags: coding, event, late night, media, photos, scripting, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world
Thanks to Spin Martin, the video blog conference under the name of vloggercon held in San Francisco at June 10 & 11 will also take place in Second Life.
Location will be the hipcast conference center at the Shalida sim.
And because it will happen I will be there and thus I did some promo for it!
It's a quick little thing so please excuse any mistakes here 🙂
Technorati Tags: 3d, architecture, event, media, Mixed Reality, vloggercon, Real Life, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world
So for all people interested I took the time to write down a little article about how to do video blogging in Second Life.
You can find it here:
How to become a famous vlogger.
It’s also linked in the sidebar.
And because of this I also released my Vlogger Starter Kit! You can find it at my showroom!
So I hope you feel like becoming a video blogger and go out there and do reports about the events you attend! Looking forward to it!
Technorati Tags: 3d, blogs, media, products, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world
I think I wrote some little summary once and I will do it again now. This one will feature:
– The release of Second Life 1.10
– The release of my Video Blog "Tao Takashi On Air" Episode 3
– On the search for lights
– Doing video at Club Camarilla
– Attending the rooftop meeting at the Federated Media Office
So as you might see this is quite some list and it was indeed a long day especially as I also had visit a client the whole day for my RL work.
So after coming back I was finishing episode 3 of my video part of this blog labeled "Tao Takashi on Air" for now. As I posted it you can see it two posts down from here or so. In the meanwhile the grid also was open again and I logged in to see how things are working now that we have lights and flexible prims. Of course I started experimenting with it immediately and built some cinema like room at my land plot (first floor) utilizing some lights. I then told some friends including Slim Warrior (of course as she was appearing in that video) and suddenly I had full house! While having a traffic from 1-10 usually I had 680 this morning as Slim Warrior kept bringing more and more fans around to watch it 🙂
I left them at some point to check out some places with lights which might have been built altready. I did this by looking at Snapzilla as there were more and more posts showing some lighted buildings. I more or less selected one randomly and landed at RacerX Gullwing's site, creator of fireworks and Castle Wars and probably much more (didn't know RacerX before but seems to be quite a cool guy :-). He did also show some of his movies to me which were quite cool and I in turn invited him to see my most recent episode at my place. Being back there I met Slim Warrior again with another group of fans.
So just checking out some photos on Snapzilla seems to be a cool way of getting new friends 🙂
(but actually the first thing that happened when visiting RacerX was a crash of my client while he was starting a firework 😉 )
Next event a little later was visiting Club Camarilla. There has been some break there and I was glad to hear that events were being held there again. I met lots of friends I haven't seen in a while and one of my first things was to tell people to switch to midnight while I was creating some moving lights and particle effects to create a cool atmosphere. Having done that I thought it might be nice to do another video again. So I did and you can see the results below.
Coming back from Club Camarilla to my plot I found the next group of fans and after they left I moved got an IM that the rooftop party at Federated Media is just starting (which was at 3am in my morning already actually but who cares, today if holiday here). So I also went there and met another bunch of cool people (from whom I knew some already from IRC), like Frans Charming, Aimee Weber, Hamlet of course, Hal9k Andalso, Games Prototype, Spin Martin (I meet him everywhere these days), Tateru Nino and many more. I will upload photos of them to flickr as soon as that screenshot issue is solved (or not, who knows) but some are attached already. It was a nice hangout of various people from Second Life and for doing some business with Federated Media you were also able to meet Lovisa Tackleberry who does the advertising for it. I guess Hamlet will write more about it later 😉
So all in all it was a very busy but nice day and I met a lot of new and interesting people which is always great! Hope to have some more of these days 🙂
PS: Spin Martin now called me the "Steve Garfield of the Metaverse" but I am not that sure that this is true 😉
Update: Hamlet's report is now online
Technorati Tags: media, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world
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