Music videos shot in Second Life and why we need more of them.

Tags

"second life", art, music video, PR, publicity, reputation

Even though the fact that many people don’t even know Second Life (still) exists is a big problem for Linden Lab and us who are enthusiastic about this online world, I still think that the bad reputation our virtual place has is also something that needs to be fixed.

And although that may not be possible, or at least not something we can completely get rid of till SL 2.0 comes around, I can’t help thinking about new ideas and schemes that might make it easier for people like me, who are out of the virtual closet, to share the brilliance of that place where I spend so much time with people who don’t know much or anything about Second Life.

That is why I get excited every time I find something that makes Second Life look good, that shows that there really is more to our virtual world than shopping, playing Barbie and Ken or hanky panky

It can be wonderful screenshots, a great documentary series or a stunning music video.

Recently Drax and I chatted about how much good things like these can do, they can completely change how people think about Second Life, if they ever had any thoughts about it to begin with!

So anyway, one of the things that I think can be wonderful advertising for Second Life is a well made music video.
You know, sometimes these go ‘viral’, as you kids call it these days, as disgusting as that may sound, that is a good thing.

That is why I am asking you, folks in SL who are artistic, who can make good super high quality videos, who can sing, make music, build amazing places, etc, etc, to get together and make stunning music videos.

If your video turns out amazing, everybody wins.
The performer gets publicity, the machinima maker gets publicity and SL gets publicity!
You may all even get  little famous.

The internet is full of Second Life videos but most of these are about grieving, drama, getting married, having babies or other sorts of things that either make SL look bad or are just very difficult to understand for outsiders.
I’ve also seen a few music videos but they only show avatars dancing, often half naked, to awful music, there is nothing that appeals to me, that is visually stunning or original.
Or they are interesting but whoever made it used an old computer with bad graphics, visited sims that haven’t been updated since 2007 or weren’t very good at editing, etc.

So go on, artists, performers, machinima makers, get together.
Feel free to use the comments section here to find others to work with and start making music videos.
These are generally not too long, don’t need long complicated stories, can use stunning visuals without having to justify just throwing in a pretty picture and if the video is good it helps the music and if the music is good it helps the video.
Of course you can also use an already well know song as basis for your video, as long as you have permission to use the recording.

In my view a music video is a rather good way to reach a wider audience.

A great example of what I think is absolutely wonderful is this old video I’ve only just discovered.
It was uploaded months ago by Pepa Cometa but only the other day did she also upload a bit of it to Flickr where I stumbled upon it.
So you may have already seen it a million times, it may have been blogged about before, I don’t care, it is new to me.

It was filmed at “H220”, a moody location created by Squonk Levenque and Miuccia Klaar, unfortunately the sim no longer exists.
The song is unfortunately not by an SL artist but by the wonderful Mumford & sons.

I think it is stunning, something I’ll be glad to share with people who’ve never heard of Second Life or have a negative view of it.

I hope to be able to share more amazing Second Life music videos soon, got any, share them in the comments!

Enjoy this wonderful video and start making your own!;

And, thank you Pepa Cometa for the tip, here is another rather wonderful SL music video, this one made by Erythro Asimov, with Cica Ghost;

Another tip, by owldragonash, intoduced me to the wonderful videos by Nina Caplin (Fuchsia nightfire), like this one with music from an actual SL artist BlindBoy Gumbo!

The pleasure of photography in Second Life with SLGo

Tags

"second life", photography, screenshots, SLGo

sI’ve always loved making nice snapshots in Second Life, or the art of ‘virtual photography’.

But if you want to make pictures that look real nice, you need a big fat super duper computer and wonderful internet connection, not something we all can afford.
Until now this has kept good top level SL photography a hobby and even job for the lucky few.

And even if you have a pretty good computer, like I do, making photos at busy events in laggy sims with all the bells and whistles such as wonderful light and shadows… things start to slow down dramatically and sometimes makes it even impossible to work.

Getting things to look just right for a great picture has always been quite an effort and/or required a lot of patience.

Recently I’ve been using SLGo a LOT more, thanks to the addition of the Firestorm viewer.
But I’ve also started using SLGo to make snapshots in SL and although at first I thought SLGo would not be very suitable for this, I’ve now changed my mind and truly love doing it.
I’d go as far as saying that SLGo has made me fall in love with SL photography again.

Because SLGo allows me to make pictures with the full ultra settings my computer barely manages without any lag or even slowing down SL.
And best of all, it even allows me to do this on my 5 year old Macbook!

You can take a look at all my SLGo made snapshots here in my Flickr album.

Although I generally prefer to first check all snapshots before I put only a selection online, I no longer really need to do this because the odds of grey avatars popping into the frame has gone down drastically thanks to SL improvements but also the amazing speed of SLGo.

Still, SLGo is not (yet) perfect and if you decide to start using it for photography there are a few things to keep in mind and suggestions that could improve the experience.

Even though you don’t really need to check pictures before uploading them, I am sure many people still would like that option, if only to pick the best of the series you’ve made during an event.
You can’t save to your disk so either email them to yourself, an option that I’ve found can cause quite a few errors when the image is big.
So I prefer sending them straight to Flickr, which makes them public right away.
I think it would be great if an extra option was added to the upload window of Flickr that allows you to set it to public or private.
I am not sure if this is something the Firestorm viewer must do or the SLGo people or both together.
But this way you can send a whole load of pictures to Flickr and then sort out the bad ones.

Another thing that is a bit annoying is that the photo window doesn’t remember all your settings.
It remembers the Metadata (name, tags, etc) which is great, but it forgets the custom settings.
I like making big pictures of about 3000 pixels and I don’t like having to set that every time I want to make a photo after I’ve logged off.

It would also be great to be able to choose a group or album you want to upload your pictures to, even though of course this does add a risk of flooding a group.

Comparing a sceenshot of my computer as it looks to me and a screenshot as it looks after I uploaded to Flickr.

A bigger problem, one that might not be easily solved because it involves your internet connection I think, is that quite often the image on my screen gets a bit fuzzy.
This isn’t a problem when you’re gaming and running around shooting, but if you’re making a photo it can be quite annoying, especially if you’ve got depth of field activated which purposely makes part of your screen fuzzy and you may find it hard to figure out which fuzziness is good and which is bad.
It would also be nice to be able to increase the resolution of the window.
Because right now my screenshots look better than my live screen.

Anyway, the disability to download textures to your computer made me at first think SLGo wouldn’t be very attractive to the many professional photographers in SL, but in the end it turns out to be not that much of an issue.

This will allow us all to make brilliant SL screenshots and that in turn will perhaps help make people realise the SL graphics have actually moved on a bit from 2007….

Another thing I find annoying is that after a while of ‘inactivity’ you get logged off, which is understandable but SL is one of those programs you quite often keep running on the background while you do other work.
A bit of photoshop, sending an email, all the time keeping an eye on the SL window or just using SL because you love listening to the music stream in a club while you work on something else… and then suddenly, you get logged off.

And one last suggestion to the folks at SLGo, how about a SLGo Flickr group where we can all upload our wonderful screenshots?
Just give the go ahead and I’ll set it up.

One final request to all your photographers (to be) out there.
If you succeed in making the most stunning SL pictures, make sure you share them and upload a few to Wikipedia Commons without any copyrights.
Yes, that will mean people will be allowed to use them for whatever they want, but it will be great publicity for Second Life because this is often a place journalists look first when they need copyright free material for their articles, so that is why they sometimes end up with very very outdated screenshots.
The ones I’ve uploaded there have already been used in articles, showing people that SL can look good and at the same time giving my sim some free attention.

Massive griefer attack across the grid

Tags

"second life", alarm, alert, attack, griefers

It’s just like the good old days!

Griefers managed to annoy thousands of people in Second Life today by rezzing rather ugly spirals that make noise and cause a hell of a lag, making life in these sims practically impossible.

According to unconfirmed reports a huge part of the grid has been taken over by these spirals, LL knows who is behind them, I won’t name them or their group here, because they would probably like it, but it is also all unconfirmed.

It seems the guilty party has not yet been banned from SL, or at least they still appear online.

One of the (many) sims to suffer is the well known Caledon sim collective, thanks to SLGo I managed to visit, fly around and even take a picture before lag became too bad.
With my regular viewer I doubt I would have been able to even take a single step.

When your sim is under attack there generally isn’t much you can do, but here are a few tips;

• Alert Linden Lab (if live chat support happens to be online…)
• Go to a place in your sim that is HIGH up, most attacks don’t reach very high and with your draw distance set to very low, lag might be a lot less at high altitude, from here you can take further steps without drowning in lag porridge.
  It is a good idea to create a landmark for this spot so you can teleport here from outside the sim.
• In the region/estate window turn off ‘Allow Public Access’, this will remove all visitors and keep new people from arriving, giving you some peace but also keeps the griefers from returning.
• In the debug tab disable everything, this may bring down lag as well and may stop the griefers toys from working.
• Return the griefers objects.
• Restart the region(s).

In most cases this will help, but of course it depends on the situation and the type of attack.

Let’s hope this one is sorted soon.

If you have any other tips, ideas, suggestions or just want to share your griefer attack story, please do so in the comments.

Caledon under attack

Interesting article about avatars and Second Life in Wall Street Journal

Tags

"second life", article, avatars, media, press, Psychology, wall street journal

The renowned Wall Street Journal has published an interesting and positive article about the use of avatars and what how they look and act says about the people behind them.

Although more common lately, it is still nice to read something positive about virtual worlds, avatars and Second Life.

The article mentions quite a few very interesting things, such as;

When people add extra inches to their self-image by making their avatars taller than they really are, the people can become more confident and aggressive in real-world negotiations. And when people make their avatars more attractive online, they tend to share personal information with strangers more readily, the researchers reported in the journal Human Communication Research.

I made my avatar the same height and as attractive (or not) as I am in real life.
But I am still rather confident and aggressive and share way too much personal information, but I guess that is because I have little choice, being all famous and such 😉

But I am very much like my avatar, or she is like me.
If you met me in SL and then in RL, you would probably recognize me but you would also recognize my character.

You can read the article on the Wall Street Journal page by clicking here.

A German tale, stunning Machinima made in the 1920s Berlin Project

Tags

"second life", film, machinima, ole etzel, The 1920s Berlin Project

Well known artist Ole Etzel, who was the subject of an excellent ‘Drax Files’ episode, moved in to a small dirty damp apartment in our 1920s Berlin sim and created a wonderful machinima in the dark streets and alleyways.

‘A German Tale’ tells us the story of an old man looking back at his childhood in Berlin.

I’m extremely excited with the end result and proud that Ole picked the city I build for this production.

In RL I’ve been to Filmschool, owned a tv/movie production company and have been a writer and director and I’m very impressed with this video, it makes me wish I had the time to start making machinima myself.

I started the 1920s Berlin Project because of my passion for history and saw in Second Life a way to share and even contaminate people from all over the world with this love for the past while at the same time teaching them a few things while learning new things myself as well.

This film does the same and I hope it grips you the way it gripped me.
It brought tears to my eyes, not just because of the story but also because I’m just so happy to see my Berlin used in such a way.

Enjoy this first episode, and of course, on behalf of everyone in 1920s Berlin; frohe Weihnachten!

New Second Life promotional videos

Tags

"second life", commercial, linden lab, promotional, video

Linden Lab has just uploaded 2 new promotional videos.

The first one is a basic tutorial on how to start your Second Life, I must confess I’m not too excited about this one;

I have shared my displeasure with the current new user experience and it seems that most SL users don’t like it very much either.
So when I see the Learning Islands mentioned I think of all the confused people standing around there not knowing what to do or where to go.
And to be honest, I had to laugh when step 4 mentions connecting with the community and shows people chatting in one of those arrival spots where, if you’ve been there, you know that in stead of a casual ‘connecting with the community’, it is more likely that there are people screaming abuse trough their microphone, you’re being spammed or freakish avatars are making you want to wash your eyes with bleach.

On the plus side, it shows that SL has a LOT to offer, more than just shopping or chatting.

The second video I liked a lot more;

Here they show off what in my eyes is one of the most important things of Second Life; creativity and the freedom to build whatever you can imagine.
They have stuffed a very wide range of things into this video, something I’ve suggested before.
SL is so many things, show that, not just one side of it.
I’m glad they have now done this with this video and they show that you can biuld whatever you want.
Only thing I miss is perhaps a few more steps of the creation process, I’d like to see someone stick a few prims together, texture them, use them.
Not just the very fancy experienced builders making amazing stuff.
But, as I said, I like it.
It shows off what people can do in SL, that we can be creative, that we can sell our stuff and that there is SO much to do and see.
A much better message than suggesting you may come spend some time with babes in bikini.

Petition to get Facebook to allow Second Life avatars

Tags

"second life", avatars, facebook, petition

A petition has popped up that asks Facebook to allow Second Life avatars to have a page, they however mean to ask Facebook for Second Life avatars to have a Facebook profile, because we’re already allowed to have Facebook pages, as long as they are managed by our RL profiles.

Will this make an impression on the Facebook people?

Probably not, I am not saying that because I am cynical but because Facebook only cares about publicity and numbers.

When cross dressers got upset about being forced to use their RL names, they caused quite a bit of fuss, demonstrated at FB HQ and received a lot of media attention.
Facebook listened to that.

Most people who have a profile on Facebook for their Second Life avatar are not going to demonstrate, we’re not going to get much media attention and to be fair, not that many of us are probably going to bother even signing the petition.

BUT… it can’t hurt to try, right?

After all, this will only work if a LOT of us sign it, if Facebook receives thousands of signatures, they will at least pay attention.

So why not give it a go and sign it.

Follow the link below and leave a signature;

https://www.change.org/p/mark-elliot-zuckerberg-facebook-allow-second-life-avatars-to-have-a-facebook-page

Firestorm now available on SL Go!

Tags

"second life", firestorm, onlive, SLGo, viewer

For months the people at Onlive have been secretly working together with Jessica Lyon to build a version of Firestorm that works in SL Go!

In a press release Onlive says that an update to SL Go now allows its users to choose between the official Linden Lab viewer or the Firestorm one.

It works for both PC and Mac but not yet on mobile devices, development for that starts in the new year.

When you launch SL Go you will be presented with a choice between the two viewers.

You should have access to the full Firestorm interface, the edit menus, preference settings, etc.
All customizations are saved from session to session, even if you played on a different device.

The best thing about SL Go, for me, is that it allows me to run SL at ultra graphics settings on pretty much any computer.
You get to enjoy SL the way it should be enjoyed without having to use a top of the range device.
Even my 5 year old macbook can now be used to enjoy SL with shadows and more.

However, I don’t just use Firestorm because I just prefer it to the official viewer, I use it because I need all the extra options it offers.
Yes, I really do need them.
When building and managing a busy roleplaying community, I depend on the building tools, the radar, etc.
I’ve written about why I prefer Firestorm to the official viewer in detail here.

So although I really like SL Go and the ability to see SL at ultra settings again (I blew up my graphics card on the Alienware laptop), I didn’t use it very much because once in SL, I wasn’t really able to do very much as I missed all the Firestorm options I needed.

Unfortunately, for this first version, according to Jessica Lyon, some of the featuresI love a lot have been disabled, for now.
For instance, the contact sets you may have been keeping (like I do) won’t be found in SLGO because there is no access to the contact sets you’ve already created as the SLGo server is not connected to wherever your contact sets are stored normally.
You can start from scratch and make new contact sets in SLGo and those will be remembered.
You will probably also have to reset a few of the settings.

Nevertheless for me it is the difference between running around hopelessly not quite knowing how to do things, not having a proper radar and not being able to instantly see who is visiting my sim and if they are wearing proper 1920s clothes or a latex miniskirt with a Viking horned helmet (Vikings didn’t have horns on their helmets!).

This new option will make me use SL Go a lot more, now I no longer have to carry my Macbook (for RL work) and heavy massive Alienware Laptop (for SL and gaming) with me when I leave my home for a few days, I just use the Macbook for both.

If you aren’t using SL Go yet, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial by clicking here.
A monthly subscription costs $9.95 (£6.95) per month for unlimited access.

Yes, SLGo allowed me to explore SL at ultra settings on my 5 year old macbook!

Linden Lab wants to hear your ideas

Tags

"second life", improvements, linden lab, suggestions

Linden Lab is continuing their new improved active way of communicating and being approachable by creating a new “Feedback & Suggestions” page on SecondLife.com

Here Second Life users are encouraged to leave their thoughts on how their virtual life can be improved.

I have a blog full of ideas and plans, so I’ll be spamming that page right after finishing this blog.

If you have some fantastic plans to make Second Life even better, make sure to let them know.

You can share your thoughts by clicking HERE.

And you can read the full official announcement HERE.

My first suggestion?
Show a message that the suggestion has been received in stead of sending you to the sign in page and then a help page.
I’ve send in the same idea 3 times but have no idea if it has been received.

*Update; it works fine in Firefox but it still happens when I try it with Internet Explorer.

SL GO now available for Ipad

Tags

"second life", ipad, mobile, onlive, SLGo

Great news coming from OnLive.

SL GO is now available on the Ipad!

Now you can enjoy Second Life on your Ipad everywhere you go with ultra high settings.

Yay shadows!

Drax got to try it out and is rather excited about the experience;

From the press release;

SL Go empowers Second Life residents to experience Second Life in full 3D and in real time on any iPad running iOS 7 or greater, without the need for an expensive desktop computer. New and existing users can simply sign in over Wi-Fi or 4G LTE to enjoy a high-fidelity Second Life experience with amazing graphics quality, full shaders, shadows and full motion capability. Streamed from OnLive’s powerful cloud-based servers, which have been clocked at speeds as high as 200 FPS set to Ultra with Maximum Render Distance, each secure Second Life session enables users to rez quickly into their favorite sims to connect with in-world friends, participate in events, engage in combat games, and enjoy immersion in Second Life at a level never before possible on iPad tablets.

SL Go offers access to the full Second Life Viewer interface, including edit menus, inventory, preference settings and chat management, adding intuitive touch controls. All user customizations are saved from session to session, even if played on a completely different device or platform. Design a beautiful scene using SL Go on your Mac or PC, and then show it off to friends on iPad. Your world transfers seamlessly, making it mind-blowingly easy to stay connected with in-world events.

“Ever since we launched SL Go for Android™, the Second Life community has been clamoring for iOS compatibility,” said Rick Sanchez, VP of Product and Marketing at OnLive. “Now, residents can keep Second Life at their fingertips whether they’re at work, home, out with friends or traveling for the holidays. And with the iPad’s stunning Retina display, the Second Life world is beautifully rendered with breathtaking 3D graphics.”

Since its launch in 2010, OnLive has enabled premium-quality gaming via the cloud on nearly any Mac or PC computer and a wide range of thin client devices, including lightweight laptops, tablets, phones and TVs—platforms that would normally lack the processing power and memory to run graphics intensive games.

To get started with SL Go for iOS, users can sign up for an OnLive account here, and choose from one of two payment plans: $9.95 (£6.95) per month for unlimited access, or pay as you go for $1.00 (£0.70) per hour. A free 7-day trial is available for monthly subscribers. iPad users in the United States can then download the free OnLive SL Go app from the iTunes Store here, or in the UK here, for instant access to their virtual world. Alternately, users can open iTunes and search for “SL Go”.

More information on Second Life can be found at www.secondlife.com. More information on the OnLive Game Service and SL Go can be found at games.onlive.com/landing/slgo.

So, if you’ve got an Ipad, go ahead, give it a go and share your experiences in the comments!