My iGoogle movie is up! Called Avatar Romance, it's about a virtual triangle involving two avatars and Facebook. It's a dynamic theme on iGoogle, the banner image changes every hour to the next episode in the story; there are 12 episodes.
To add the theme, click here.
It was created as a new media piece, and ideally should be viewed on iGoogle over the course of a day. But it's also a comic strip for a less tech-intensive version. The comic is here: www.peggynelson.com/avatar.
Two recent entries of note, both Shakespeare. One, scenes from Act I of Hamlet, with photomapped avatars in the Second Life Globe Theater. This performance was supposed to be experienced in-world, which I missed, but will catch the next one when they're finished voice-casting and animating Act II. The machinema was a screen capture uploaded to the companion website, edited of course with the requisite film tropes of cuts, pans, and zooms, although it could have used more of those. Most of it was left straight on, as if the novelty of avatars acting was enough to watch through the very solid and very rectilinear fourth wall.
The Uncanny Valley was much in evidence with these extended close-ups. The eyes - much too big for the faces, almost to the sides of the head like killdeer, probably in an attempt to recognize the eyetracking fact that we look at anthropomorphic images the most, and within them faces, and within faces, eyes. But these eyes did not move or emote, so the effect was oddly taxidermic. And the movement - the other elements were completely stationary while the mouths moved. The hair, other body muscles, fabric, and other elements - like the mouths were poking through a hole in one of those panels at the carnival with a painted strongman and bearded lady on the other side of the wood.
The other entry was a montage of scenes from Macbeth on a screen in a banquet hall hosted by NYU. I think this was a straight-to-machinema production, but not sure. In any event, in this production in-world editing tools were not only used, but exposed to the video capture, so that the HUDs and arrows and other interface elements were seen in use by the Macbeth characters to manipulate objects and their environment in general (turning it upside down, other transformations). As if Peter Sellars was forcing Siegfried and Brunnhilde to work the ropes and pulleys of stagecraft while belting out arias, slaying dragons and falling in love. Exposing the mechanics at the same time as performing the performance alternately undermines and enhances the suspension of disbelief, setting up an oscillation of projection states in the viewer, which they need to navigate as best they can. This Brechtian focus is, I think, effective, as it gives viewers something else to look at and do and think about other than the fact that the avatars look almost realistic, but not quite.
