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Passage to Zhong Fu was originally created by me, Poid Mahovlich, duckyfresh Wantanabe and Dizzy Banjo for the 48 Hour Film Project in Second Life. If you’re unfamiliar with how the 48 Hr Film Project works, what happens is that all teams are given 3 random items that they must include; a prop, a character and a line of dialog. Addtionally, each team is randomly assigned a genre that they must work with. For this, all teams had to have a flamingo as a prop, the character Tony Martin - teacher and the line of dialog, ‚ÄúThat‚Äôs the way that it goes.‚Äù As for genre, we were tasked to make a ‚Äúroad movie.‚Äù We had blast putting this together and are pretty happy with the results. Of course, since we were one of the event’s sponsors we weren’t part of the competition.

After turning in our cut on Sunday night, we knew there were a few more things we wanted to do to the film. So what I’m posting here is a little different. This is probably the 50-something hour version. We added back in the scene with the cage which we originally had to cut to meet the time requirements. Doing that meant that Dizzy had to compose some new music as that scene really joins the two before it and the one after as a single musical section. Poid and I also shot a new ending scene. The original had Poid walking down a city street but that came from the initial idea which sort of evolved as we shot and edited the piece. I like this ending much better because it brings us back to where the film starts, having changed - which, I think, is the theme and was the inspiration for adding the I Ching quote at the beginning.

We’re going to show it inworld on one of the Princeton Sims. Please join us this Sunday, February 3, 2008 from noon - 2 p.m. SLT. Screening SLURL. The event will feature live music by Dizzy Banjo and will take place on an ephemeral landscape designed by Poid Mahovlich. Come and interact with the cast and crew, props and scenery used in the filming.

Read more here and here.

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Millions of Us and¬†Crayon¬†realize the winning design for Coca-Cola’s “Design a Coke Machine” Contest, concepted by Second Life resident¬†Emerie May.

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Electronic Musician Kirsty Hawkshaw and Second Life Filmmaker Rob Wright Collaborate

We are launching an artist-in-residence program to discover and celebrate the work of emerging artists in the virtual world and social network space.

The first artist-in-residence will be UK-based Rob Wright, known as “Robbie Dingo” in Second Life. Wright has won widespread acclaim for a short film ‚Äì a 3D interpretation of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” ‚Äì that was produced entirely in Second Life. His first project commissioned by Millions of Us is a film interpretation of the song “Meteors” by Kirsty Hawkshaw and produced by Ulrich Shnauss. Kirsty is a prominent figure in electronic music known for her distinctive vocals and her work with the band Opus III. This video can be seen above.

Millions of Us’ artist-in-residence program will sponsor a number of artists in the coming year. The artists will collaborate informally with the Millions of Us creative team and work independently on their own projects. The relaxed atmosphere, unstructured program, and technical resources provided by Millions of Us are intended to spur unconventional results.

“Millions of Us is committed to finding the best talent in virtual worlds and all new media in order to bring them to a larger audience,” said Douglas Gayeton, Chief Creative Officer. “This is in part because we want to bring the freshest thinking possible to our campaigns, but also because we are inspired by the rapidly evolving work being produced by today’s digital artists and want to give back to the community.”

For more information on how to apply for the Millions of Us artist-in-residence program, please contact Celebrity Millionsofus within Second Life or via email: celebrity@millionsofus.com.

The video can also be found on YouTube.

It’s official and we’re busting with pride. Wagner James Au has the full story of the deal on New World Notes and Xeni Jardin covers it on Boing Boing.

Back in March of this year, my email box filled up one morning with notes from everyone I knew containing links to this film on Youtube. Each email had an almost identical message — usually something like “Have you seen this!?” Well, I contacted the creator and learned that it was the 1st episode in a 10 part series. I also learned that Douglas was a part time goat farmer recently returned from living in Tuscany and now living in nearby Petaluma. Since then, we’ve formed a friendship and he’s joined MoU as Chief Creative Officer. Together we’re begin to shape a cross-platform vision of virtual worlds and a goal of elevating the medium to an art form.

Congratulations Douglas. Can’t wait to see the rest of the episodes on HBO.

I can’t stop watching this VIDEO of the event we did to help Scion launch their new line of 2008 cars. I’ve watched it 10 times now and it’s still hard to tell what’s happening in Chicago and whats happening in Scion City Second Life. The Scion guys are amazing clients to have because of the risks they take and how far they push the envelope. Enjoy.

On April 3rd 2007, Intel held their 30th Anniversary Embedded Systems
conference in San Jose. Doug Davis, group GM gave a speech and then
described how Intel had worked with the guys from Orange county
choppers to design a motorcycle based on Intel technology. This video
played and then, with a roar from the crowd, the real bike roared from
backstage and was revealed for the first time.

I’m pretty pleased with how we were able to mashup Google Earth footage with Second Life machinima.

So I’m sitting here in Aspen getting ready to fly back to San Francisco and just thinking about the event. Overall, I was blown away by how well it all worked and people really seemed to enjoy themselves. Going into it, we were pretty nervous because (as Mark Wallace said to me), “comedy is such a high bandwidth experience. With the impending release of realtime voice capabilities in Second Life (and the inevitable debate about that), I thought I’d jot some thoughts about doing comedy in SL.

The general format of the event was as follows:

1.  People arrived and we had drinks and hung out for about 15 minutes.

2.  Hyla Matthews, the standup comedian, welcomed the crowd, did about 5 minutes of schtick and then introduced some videos of comedians from the Festival in Aspen

3.  Hyla did more schtick, this time walking into the audience for some live interraction.  Intro to more videos, this time selections from the film festival component ofthe Aspen Event.

4.  More schtick, this time focusing on Second Life jokes, which seemed to work really well.  Intro final videos from This Just In.

The toughest thing, by far, was the 17 second delay from when Hyla said something on the Skype call and when it was heard in Second Life.¬† Hyla really struggled with this — trying t get straight who was haring what and when.¬† In so many ways, comedy is about split second reactions and when the audience said something in chat, a 17.5 second reaction just doesn’t quite feel split second.¬† Behind the scenes, we did a lot of work to make this easier for Hyla and less apparent to the audience.

The other thing we noticed was that without the immediate feedback from the audience, Hyla couldn’t tell whether people were laughing or she was getting “crickets”.¬† One great idea that came up was in the future to have Laugh-Meters that the audience¬† could click to register overall amusement.

In general this was an amazingly enjoyable and eye-opening experience.  It also makes me realize just how game-changing the addition of real-time voice will be for day-to-day interraction, collaboration and work, and for entertainment.

Here’s a video we did over the last few weeks for our friends at Ogivly One in Beijing to celebrate Chinese New Year. Machinima by Buhbuhcuh Fairchild at Alt-Zoom Studios.

Just a short post to say how amazed and excited I am that the Entertainment Industry has woken up to the power of virtual worlds. The picture below made sense to me because in so many ways it feels like the early forays of Hollywood into Second Life and similar environment will feel like translating burlesque stage acts onto the silver screen in the early 20th century.

“Tis the season and since it’s snowing on Millions of Us sim, I thought it would be nice to share this video Holiday card we just did for the folks over at Leo Burnett Detroit (just blogged by Adrants) For some reason, nothing makes me as happy listening to Run DMC do Christmas in Hollis around this time of the year. Masterfully produced by Kathleen Craig and Michael Verdi. Enjoy!