Sometimes I’ll make a video to record an event, sometimes to to show a beautiful place, and then sometimes just because the moment takes you and you want to record and remember it.
This is just a very short and simple video, with minimal editing as a reminder of why I love my parnter, Roxette Wise, and how much I love our Sunday nights together that we always set aside for ourselves.
We recently celebrated 1 year together, and I hope there will be many more!
I always like the challenge of something new to film, and so when Trini and Aimee asked if I’d like to have a look around their homestead on Kernow, I jumped at the chance and was rewarded with a beautifully crafted home to show off to it’s best. Not hard given the artistic design skills of these two excellent builders.
As always, choosing the right lighting it one of the first, and often trickiest steps, but after a bit of playing with various windlight settings, I chose a simple and lightly modified sunset to keep the warmth of the area while giving a nice silouette to the treehouse towards the final scenes.
As well as being their home, there are also many public areas on the sim, including the gallery where they display a selection of their work. The real treasure was found when looking around near the lake in the centre and finding the entrance to a cave, which lead to the most spectacular cavern. It did take quite a few attempts to fly smoothly through the narrow passage that lead to it, but was well worth it.
Finally, the choice of music was Adam Fielding on the Distant Activity album from Magnatune, and this was simply because I was listening to the album while editing, and this piece of music just seemed to fit the mood I was looking for.
Simple editing was all that was needed to bring this all together, and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I did making it!
Something I’ve invested in recently as part of building up a selection of tools for making my videos is Pro Scores, and decided that this was worthy of a quick blog post in itself.
I came across Pro Scores in a rather obscure way; as a big fan of the TV series Lost, I always listen to the LostCasts podcast, and for their podcast they have some great intro music. After listening back over some older podcasts found the music was made by Rob van den Berg. I decided to do a little digging and found his website, and after following more links, found Pro Scores, created by Rob.
The package is available on DVD or by Download, and once I’d downloaded the rather hefty zip files, I had over 4GB of music samples from which to piece together musical scores.
Editing with Sonar LE
This is perfect for someone like me who has no musical talent and never progressed beyond the triangle in school, as you can build your music from the various high quality musical building blocks provided. An obvious pre-requisite of this is some form of music software, and I’m using the one that came with my microphone, Sonar LE by Cakewalk.
The sound and music is geared more towards dramatic and tense, though with careful selection, you can also produce something that is a little more gentle as I’ve done in my Pteron video.
Priced at $95.95, and supplied with some excellent and comprehensive tutorials, I’d certainly recommend this for anyone wanting to create their own soundtracks for their work.
Tonight, purely by chance, I dropped by on what is soon to be our new home on Night Flower, and was lucky enough to find Saiyge Lotus in the middle of terraforming the land.
To watch an entire sim being reshaped by hand was a truly fascinating thing to watch, and I couldn’t resist grabbing a quick bit of video as she worked. No fancy editing required here, I think Saiyge’s work does it all!
We’ll be looking forward to moving in offically to Night Flower, and once it’s complete, hope to have a video documentary of the whole build process, and a lovely new home to show at the end of it.
My partner, Roxette Wise, is a clothes designer in SL, and as she’s starting out with a new store and kicking off a fresh line of clothing, we decided it would be a good idea to start doing short video adverts for the new releases.
This first one was for the recently released Blossom outfit, and being a spring outfit, we wanted to keep a light and bright feel to the video. After a little playing around we decided it would be interesting to have the avatar rotating on the spot and moving between all of the available dress colours throughout the video to show the full range.
Fine tuned editing
For the first part, we had to do a little scripting and created a basic rotating pose stand, which it turns out was the easy part of the production! The hard part came when taking the video and finding the best way to make it all line up and appear to swap between colours in a series of smooth transitions. On our first attempt, we tried changing poses with each outfit, and this was an obvious mistake, as lining them up became an impossible task. We then opted for sticking with one pose, and getting a full rotation in each outfit. Stitching the clips to fade from one to the next seamlessly was a bit of a challenge, but an interesting one to do, and a technique I’d like to revisit in the future.
The final steps were to give it music, chosen by Roxette from magnatune.com, which is an excellent source of royalty free music, and then the ever arduous task of recording a voice over. I hate my voice. I’m sure everyone is the same, but at every time I do it I become more comfortable with it and doing it in less takes, and I’m sure even the professionals take a few recordings to get it right.
I’ve been very pleased with the final result, as is Roxette, and hopefully we’ll be making more of these adverts as she designs more wonderful outfits!
The idea to film Pteron was born of two factors; one being that I’d seen some wonderful pictures taken on this sim by Nimil and posted on Plurk / Flickr, which looked like a particularly unique build and an interesting subject to work on. The other reason was that the night before I’d been looking around at alternative music sources for my videos and came across Pro Scores; a package which gives you a vast amount of musical samples for which you can create your own musical scores. I’ll write a little more about Pro Scores in a later post, as it’s worth dedicating it’s own post to.
Apocolypse Please by Nimil Blackflag
Pteron is a particularly unusual sim, and I’d say it’s hard to take a bad pictures there, as everything is just so breathtaking. For the video I decided to tweak the Windlight settings and enhance the ethereal feel of the place, giving the sky a pinkish tint and adding more haze density to give things in the distance and out-of-focus glow. As the city itself seems to have a glow to it, I’d recommend some form of night setting to see it at it’s best.
Pteron SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/pteron/128/128/2
I wanted to give a solemn and powerful feel to the city, and so kept with slow sweeps while moving through the city and exploring it’s hidden underwater areas, with the music I wanted to create in mind.
As a first attempt at making a soundtrack with Pro Scores and the audio software I’ve had sitting on my computer unused for the past year, I was quite pleased with the final result, giving the video the impact I was after, even if the final result was a little longer than I would have liked, I feel it does Pteron justice.
So, a new blog, a new start!
The purpose of this blog is to document the videos I create in Second Life and showcase on Vimeo, and here I hope to give a little more insight behind the making of the videos, such as techniques used and what inspired them.
I’m always happy to answer any technical questions about how I make these videos, although the way I do it is probably just one of many ways it can be done, and I certainly won’t claim it’s always the best way!
Also, if anyone would like a video created for some purpose, feel free to contact me either through the blog or through Osiris Pfalz in Second Life. I’ve not got an email address I want to put on here at the moment, and if anyone thinks to try osirispfalz@gmail.com or osiris.pfalz@gmail.com, that’s not me! I’d be interested to know who claimed those…
Over the next few weeks I’ll try and go back and document some of my older videos, and will post up any new videos I create in the meantime, so watch this space for further updates!
