DRAXTOR AND FLUFEE


What a delight! I was unable to attend the live interview, but I just watched it on Adobe Connect at http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p7woh54vt9z/


It was deeply inspiring to discover that Draxtor and Flufee are incredibly warm and generous film-makers who are very interested in encouraging new machinimatographers. Part of their attitude is based on a belief that “Machinimas democratize cinema.”


For machinimatographer newbies, Draxtor and Flufee offered many tips, including the following:


•Don’t be put off by being a beginner or not having really great software and equipment. For example, you can find free or cheap software that will be fine for most of your purposes, like FRAPS for film capture and Audacity for sound tracks. If you do have some money to invest, put it into getting a higher quality computer because film-making puts high demands on computers.


•Do expect to find making a film to be very labor intensive. Draxtor and Flufee typically have each scene filmed from three angles and also get a lot of extra footage of avatars with moving and unmoving lips. All of this then has to be melded together in the editing stage of production. The importance of the lips footage is that it is one way to deal with the inaccurate lip syncing in SL. SL lip movement is really just a response to if there is sound or not, rather than a response to real dialogue. For this reason, you can have actors say anything over or over again, or even just have a loud TV in the background during much of your filming. Combine this footage with plenty of cuts of avatars reacting to what has been said, and you’ll have an effective work-around for the lip-syncing problem. Later record your real dialog track separately with a program like Audacity.


•Avoid avatars with complex outfits/hair/bling. They will lower your recording frame rate. Typically you want your frame rate to be about 25-30 frames per minute. Draxtor often gets a frame rate between 60-100 frames per minute, and then converts everything to 30 frames per minute to use in his editing software.


•If you want to mix RL and SL in your machinima, use a green/blue screen behind your actors in one of the worlds. Then Google “green screen” or “blue screen” for a wide variety of techniques on what to do with this.


•Incorporating humor in your films is wise, but be brutally critical when you review your scripts and get rid of anything that doesn’t work. Look at successful comedy series, like 30 Rock and The Office to get a feel for what others will find funny, and then get a 9-year-old and/or loving but critical spouses and friends to give you honest feedback.


•There is a huge potential market for educational machinimas and other educational uses of SL. To have a look at the films Draxtor has made on some of the possibilities, go to: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC505E316DB51834A


•To get some of your very tech-savvy students engaged in your projects, give them hands-on Hollywood film crew tasks to do. For example, put someone in charge of finding five good filming locations by flying around SL, locating good sites, taking pictures of them, and reporting back.


•If you’re having trouble getting started with ideas on what to film, consider filming any interactions you see in SL and playing with them, or interviewing the real people behind some of the avatars you meet. In RL, people often regard SL avatars as cartoons, but there are real, fascinating, and important people behind many avatars.


•Finally, to develop a fan base:


Post your productions on YouTube, Facebook, and anywhere else you can think of.


Also post comments on Twitter and respond to any queries you get from anyone.


Before filming, put out general calls for extras who want to act in your films. Each extra will each bring you a small fan base.


In addition, incorporate product placement of items donated by SL Marketplace businesses. Putting these products into your films will tap into the fan bases of the product creators.


Heike Philp concluded the interviews with Draxtor and Flufee by getting them to agree to be judges on the jury evaluating the machinimas produced by this year’s MachinEVO participants. The duo also offered to look at the 40 machinimas created by previous MachinEVO participants and give feedback. As I mentioned earlier, the adjectives “warm,” “generous,” and “encouraging” fit Draxtor and Flufee well.