More attempts at filming....

Ok so I finally got over some technical issues, getting the right machine blah blah...
and tried some filming again.
The first video is a very short stupid event less situation of me in an underwater world. Here I was still shooting using the keyboard as my camera functions.... Interesting thing in this water world place was that their were tidbits about the environment (real world environmental issues) that people can read and engage with. It's like a very cool looking 3D presentation about issues that people don't really want to listen to but they might just here...hmmm...
here's a picture of me....

Here is the link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiCFPJbPlQU

For the second one I started messing around with using the mouse rather than the keyboard for camera. The movements one can get are a lot smoother and controlled. I decided to try filming something and entered this space called Club Close Up. I noticed many people sitting around alone and some people dancing. No one was responding to me however when I spoke to them. Turned out that the owner of the club pays people to just have their avatars sitting around so his club looks busy. This I discovered after a woman returned to her keyboard and we talked, about her, second life as well as my project. Turns out that even she wants to make a film in second life. Anyway everyone there was just there making money...away from their keyboard!! Which is called camping...and it turns out is a very common phenomenon.

This video is for those who don’t know what second life looks like. People pay a lot of attention to the way they look and some avatars are extremely detailed...and earlier when I spoke about identity, crafting and indulging in oneself... one can see here what I mean.

I ended up talking to a few people there…one conversation was with a Hispanic hot looking avatar with huge boobs. I told her what I was attempting and she said she would act in SL. I asked her to 'act,' both in her second life and her real life but then she said no no... I want to remain anonymous. It turned out that she was 41 years old and didn't want to reveal her real self on camera. It was only natural I thought for her to create an avatar that looked 20 years younger. :)

[The Spanish chick/woman is the one sitting on a beanbag hovering in the sky... a man's arms are wrapped around her...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ3OYx_Wf5c

AAAAAAAAAANNNNNND edits of conversations will be coming up..... so keep checking. ;)

Identity?

What is our identity made off? Who am I and why am I that person? My life is a string of mismatched images that come together to form me. When I walk into SL in my head and my heart I take all those images and relationships. When I speak to someone from another land I put together different contexts from my past. People exist in our heads based only on the information we have had through our lives, and the information they give off to us. This information is called memory. In SL everything is information, what people choose to give and what people choose to keep hidden. We craft the way our avatars look, the activities we choose to engage in, the strangers we choose to befriend based on how we would like to be seen and what we would like to try and learn about but are too embarrassed or afraid to try. We experiment with parts of us that lay dormant, yet restless. In SL we can hide the truth, about our pasts and context, about our gender and culture. We can talk to strangers, get intimate with them and leave them behind the next day to find a new relationship. SL is a safe machine that responds to our wants and desires, a break away from the rut of daily life, that is fast becoming for some a first life. This project is a look into myself, a look into being human and wanting. It is about the power of truth and honesty. About being openly scandalous.

Runnin through my life...my profile...

To begin with I needed to meet myself, find details that have made me me. Build a profile of what I have taken from life and stored in my memory.

Although I was born in Jaipur, Rajasthan, I have lived in many places.

Birth brought me into an Indian family from Rajasthan. Into a family where I was the youngest, with an older brother. I take art from my mother, paint at an early age. I take being spoilt by my father.

I move…I take stories of being pampered, pushed in a pram by my brother and a servant through orchards in a town called Ganganagar. Stories of refusing the food at home and only eating the fat rotis (Indian flat round bread) with white butter from the servants.

I move…I take living in Paris, learning broken French (to later forget it and give way to broken Hindi). The metro, white people, baguette and cheese, lots of cheese. I take fancy dresses, gymnastics, plays and birthday cakes of different shapes. I make friends from everywhere and tell them I’m Indian. I draw. I get my brother into trouble, and sometimes he tells me stories he makes up. I throw my milk away everyday in a flower pot and get caught, only to be supervised thereafter. I hear Lucy in the sky with diamonds on wooden floors to the smell of cigarettes and wine and think it’s a fine song.

I move…Delhi takes me to an Indian school, struggles with admission and doing badly in Hindi. I take to living with my grandparents. I climb trees, have short hair and sing songs in assembly about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I plummet down super long double slides to land in a box of sparkling sand. I take to being a tomboy and attempt to grow up with three other boys. We make up games like egg drop (drop an egg from a height and make sure it doesn’t break). I take dirt paths and cycles, thorns and scratches, paint cards to sell at fetes and concoct and built the most evil Ravana (demon from the Ramayana) every year on Dushera (festival where Ravana is burnt and destroyed). I take to being carefree, confident and outspoken. I bully the younger kids and am very mean to them at times by stepping on their feet (literally).

Twice a year, every year from Rajasthan I take clothes and bright colors (lehengas, salwars, patialas, kurtas and chunnis). I take the food (daal baati on rainy days, pachkute, gunde ka aachar, khud chicken and ghee, lots of ghee). I take fragments of the language (marwari from my grandparents and father). I take the festivals of diwali, rakhi and holi and others whose names I don’t remember. I make a connection with feeding birds, pigeons lots of them, water bowls and dana. I take with me hierarchy, being served, being upper class. I take the small town. I take images of kites in the sky with almost no sky left. I take the simple staying at home pace of life, sitting on muddas in the afternoon, the cooler whirring. I take the staircase lined with police photographs, my grandfather everywhere saluting and being saluted. I take stories from him and framed medals. I take the Indian government from my father and the twenty people who take care of things, run the house, maali, driver, someone to get my passport done, assistance at the airport, zero waiting in lines and zero paper work. I take with me differences between men and women and silly old traditions. I fight being able to walk into the kitchen only on the 4^th day after I’ve washed my hair, when I’m chumming (menstruating). I fight the men not entering the kitchen, not learning how to cook and think that they should. I argue that cutting my nails at night is not a sin. I fight how the women drink only with the men.

I move… Dhaka, Bangladesh I take with me Islam, Christianity, Judaism and people of many other cultures and religion. I take Americans for the friends I made and not for the country. I take living the life of the daughter of a diplomat, danger in a foreign country, political tension, and a giant lawn the size of a football field. I take the moment my father gives me the keys to the car. I take with me the loss of a dog due to carelessness and the loss of a friend to cancer. I take trying to fit in, trying to be cool and with that an American accent. I take bake sales, secret santa, dances in school with punch, proms, prom dates and dresses. I take art class with super jumbo jars of paint. I take cigarettes and alcohol and weed. I take intimacy with a Muslim boyfriend and fear sex. I take intimacy with a French and English best friend. I take being a part of her family, drinking, smoking and eating dinner in diplomatic clubs, where we play pool. I take tequila and lemon and swimming at night.

I take trips to Nepal, being a tourist, and getting a tattoo (I now want to get rid of). I take treks and travel, Bangkok, big malls, and beaches you see in movies.

I move to Woodstock Mussoorie, India and take boarding school in my final year of school. I take hills, sunsets its hard to take your eyes of and the winterline, a time when the sky splits into two colors. I take strange weather, people from the world over, this time in my own country if I can call it that and lights out at 10. I take going to chapel, intro to Christianity and smoke ganja hiding in caves.

I move… In Delhi again I take the Indian education system, lining up for college and not really fitting in. I take multimedia design in a pretentious building, with teachers who don’t come to teach. I take the urban, the largeness of the city, the fear of being a girl alone driving on the road at night. I take the big bars and restaurants the dress up posh and enter a club. I take with me being Indian, the capital of the country, and being patriotic. I revamp my image of the government, the white ambassadors twice a day, the servants, the clean house.

I move.... South of India, Bangalore I come self assured and confident. I take dosas, idli’s and coffee on the road. I hear kanadda and don’t understand it. I fit in and find others that are like minded. I spend time thinking about the world, art and design. I moonlight, get my first pay and send it to my mother. I take the good feeling of her reaction. I take money from my father every month and overspend. I dream of saving the country from problems I’m told it has. I take a complicated relationship that’s bad in bed thinking that I’m not actually loved, with a boy I can never claim as mine. We take ideas of destiny and toss them around frivolously. I take acid and a new meaning to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I push boundaries and scare myself to take risks. I try cocaine and whiskey and stay up for over 48 hours. I take willpower to try but to not overdo. I take suspension from college, cry and then laugh about it. I take friends who I know will stay and a context that I feel I fit into. I take people. People in my clothes, in my bed, in my car. I take having no room, no space and being pushed. I take letting myself get pushed. I try to help another as a way to help myself. I take lying on the ground with footprints on my back and pretend that I am happy. I take the people all around me to be able to say go away. I take being lonely and calling them back.

Now I’m friendly but I’m restless and as clichéd as it sounds, I’m so so alone in a crowded room.

Change... identity...beliefs and some Philisophy

Well things have changed and instead of doing a hardcore fiction film I felt the most honest way I can represent and show what the virtual world is to me, is by putting myself into the film.

One reason I want to do this is because I feel like when I go into this space I am both the film maker as well as the virtual world citizen. I too get involved with things that happen in the world of Second Life, and I too get taken up with the illusion. It becomes an account of a 'newbie,' as they say in the virtual world. I see every time I log in a little change, and a little acceptance in myself.
It's very strange because when I first joined this network I joined with a certain cynicism. I thought why would people want to spend so much time on some pixellated world...believing that they are going clubbing or sitting on the beach. But as I spend more and more time in SL, my avatar, Spray Oceanlane has become a part of me and I have started to relate to her.

A second reason I have chosen to put myself in the film is because as a filmmaker I feel we are like parasites. Always going into other people's lives and homes and exposing them. We stay behind the camera and call the shots. In the end we craft something, that hopefully is a little ethical and at the same time engages an audience. I want to take a risk however, and see if I can expose myself.

The way I see the film going right now is a non-fiction approach, almost like a virtual travelogue involving people I meet there and friends I make. I'd like to explore themes of anonymity vs. honesty, of identity in your cultural context vs. the identity in a virtual context and how it changes.
I think the concept of identity is really tested and questioned in a space like SL because one can only tell so much about the other person by the way their avatar looks. And more often than not, the digital representation of them self does not look like their physical self in the real world. When you're in SL you really feel like you're standing in front of a global audience, an audience that you cannot take for granted and really do not know what to expect.

I have found that if you are honest with people in the virtual space about who you are, what you intend to do etc, than even they are honest with you. This I feel is because honesty is not exactly the name of the game in the virtual space, because the whole point is exploring
identities, people you can be or would like to be. The identity you project in this space is not necessarily the identity you project yourself to be in real life.
And this where I begin to wonder why would you want to be someone else, or are you that person anyway and here you have an outlet for it because in your cultural real world context you do not?
Something I've questioned and wondered for a long time is why people have to be anonymous before saying or doing something, why these cultural rules that we have in each of our own contexts easily disappear when we are in a virtual world. And therefore I admire somewhere the conduct, however crass it may be in a space like SL, because it is so human. Yet we have to be human in hiding because as humans we are afraid of what we are capable of. We are afraid to confront and accept our desires and questions and feelings. These desires manifest themselves in a form that only a space like SL can allow, a digital virtual one. It is a space where there is no risk, consequence and fear. (Heavy statement... I know. Not fully sure of it but I think roughly that's what it is)
In many ways this kind of space is healthy, but at the same time it makes me angry.

I am an Indian and in many ways my family is traditional. There are values and systems that have been in place for many a year. I challenge these values all the time, and somewhere I feel I can do that because my education has been global and diverse. I have studied in International schools almost all my life. I have studied with students from many different countries who all come with their own rules, identities and viewpoints. I have learnt to find myself in a global space, and not necessarily an Indian space. Somewhere I feel it has made me very tolerant, observant and empathic to the world as a whole.

But why does it make me angry? I think it's because I feel that if we really want to say something or do something we should be able to and not hide from it. But there are consequences, there are people who will not agree, and it is easier to do what you are told than to go against it. I fight that. I feel honesty is a beautiful thing, no matter how sad or upsetting it can be. I guess honesty is what leads to truth, and truth is something that no one can fight, well they can fight it but in the end it prevails.

Yesterday somebody told me that what is raw cannot  be touched, what is raw is the truth.
Issues I have with neglecting the natural world, for neglecting our bodies, which virtual spaces tend to do, come from that. The natural world is raw, it cannot be questioned for there are no answers. The human body too is raw like the animal. It can be pondered and wondered over and some say its God's creation. I don't know. But the human mind... aaahhh... now I don't know what to say. Maybe the virtual world is also raw, a manifestation of the rawness of being human.

I can go on rambling, so I'll stop now. What I've written here is a little insight into me, my thoughts and my beliefs. It may or may not help you understand the project better.
 I hope it does.

The Original Diploma Proposal

The Design Brief

This project aims to become a short fiction film on how technology’s attempt at simulating the natural world can prove to be problematic. The basic premise of the film is that the path technology and man are taking together is a dangerous one, one that is taking us further away from the natural world. I personally feel that man’s growing disconnect from his environmental surroundings is something we must think about.

For some time now I have been intrigued by the line between the ‘real world,’ and the ‘virtual world.’ I believe the online world gives us many freedoms as well as takes away some. The use of anonymity for one is extremely powerful and allows people to express in ways they cannot in ‘real life.’ At the same time however, we lose out on fundamental aspects like touch, smell, taste, blood, dirt etc. Masks are both put on and taken off and there seems to exist a heightened sense of honesty between people, possibly due to the nature of being able to be an anonymous identity online. Communication online allows us to express in a very real and human way, yet the mode of communication itself is so unnatural.

It is important to understand the architecture of such spaces. To me they live off the option of the safe ending, much like in films and television. You can turn your machine off, poof the world is gone. We can say anything and be anyone because you’ll never have to meet the people you meet online in the real world. You can change your identity at any point and while gaming for example, you can always start over. You can also have multiple identities, stepping in and out as a different avatar. Second Life (SL), a 3-D virtual world, is not even a game, rather a ‘real world,’ like the one we live in today except with style. The difference however, between watching a T.V show and living in SL, is that SL is dynamic and continues to change with the way users construct and interact with it. 95% of the content in SL is constructed by the ‘avatars,’ that live there. The difference however, is that in real life you can’t start over. You have a social and biological responsibility, which if neglected can prove to be harmful.

Living online affects us both biologically and psychologically, and many of its effects can be seen today. For example, Amsterdam has come up with gaming rehab centers for gamers who manage to mess up their ‘real life,’ relationships as well as lose their motor skills. One gamer got so addicted that he wouldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom; rather he would set an empty bottle next to him. He would eat if there was food in front of him, otherwise not. A part of the program at the rehab center makes the gamers perform simple tasks like rolling a ball through their legs to the person behind them. They also go through a series of exercises that breakdown their competitive nature internalized by them due to the competitive nature of the games the play. They are advised to never game again, much like heroin addicts. Virtual worlds like SL are gaining more and more popularity and it is expected that by 2011 four out of every five internet users of today will be part of some online world. A big reason I feel people get addicted to living online, is that one can make real money in a space like SL. You can buy property, start a business, or get a job and earn money.

India is still nascent in its wake of technology as compared to other countries like Japan and The United States. Yet India’s economy is growing at a rapid pace, and many technological changes are starting to influence our lives. On the more positive note however, India and other countries in the Indian subcontinent are different. One example can be drawn from our sense of family. We have cultural support systems that do not exist in other parts of the world. Our parents look after us and their own parents, and when we get older we do the same. It is in our culture to look after and welcome those that are in our family and make guests feel at home. Another example is food. Our country is still largely agrarian and many of us who live in the city still buy our vegetables from the market and cook food the way it has been traditionally. These sensibilities, like identifying the different spices we put in our food connects us to the natural world. It is however, slowly deteriorating as mass produced products fill the market to homogenize our taste buds. In Jaipur, Rajasthan, where I come from, the entire city feeds the birds. It is in their culture and tradition to do so. At dusk every telephone and electricity wire is covered with sleeping pigeons. To care for and nurture another are aspects that make people better human beings, and it’s a shame that these values are getting clouded by a new kind of societal structure that is emerging.

Research Questions

How far can we go with simulating the world around us, what are the different technologies that exist today already to mimic image, sound, touch etc.?

Will our bodies start to look different and will certain organs become dysfunctional because of our relation to the world around us. For example, people who live in cities walk a certain way vs. people who live in villages. Same way people who grow up in front of the computer will have a body as well as a body language of their own.

Will our diets change much like how food changed for a working person always on the go?

How will a person who has for example, never been to a waterfall experience a waterfall in the virtual space? What will that experience mean to them and how different can that experience be for another person who goes to the same virtual ‘programmed’ location?

Given that everybody has more than one identity, and that the virtual space is a place to explore our different identities, will people begin to realize and be conscious of their different selves, or will we fall into categories of identities?

Approaches/Process

- Narrative and Language

The story which is in the process of being written continues to change as I discover new things about the virtual world. The characters in the film represent different viewpoints on whether the simulated world is problematic or not, how it is thrilling or beneficial etc. Through the interaction of the characters, and the weight I give to each my point of view shall emerge. It is of course not so clinical. The film deals with human emotion and concepts of love, loss, identity and memory.

- Treatment

The look and feel is extremely important. The way I’m going about the film is finding locations and materials in the existing world and through visual clues move between the virtual and the real. There will be two kinds of actors, the virtual actor and the real life actor.

The virtual actors will be the avatars I create in SL. These actors will be played by people in the real world. The avatars can be molded to great detail, for example you can even decide how long your eye lashes should be, or what fabric you wear. After some research on SL I have discovered that it is possible to shoot in this space within the program itself. You can shoot both point of view shots as well as third person shots. The camera can go pretty much anywhere. The footage gets saved in a space you dedicate in your hard drive and can be edited in editing softwares like Final Cut Pro. I have been spending some time in SL, walking around and exploring locations, camera functions and properties of the space itself. SL now is voice enabled, so instead of people typing to converse, which they still do, many people are talking to each other. Another thing about the space is its sound design, which is extremely well crafted. For example you can be by the beach, the sound of the wind, the birds, the ocean etc is done really well.

This brings me to the Real Life shooting. The character lives in a space like Monte CarloMonte Carlo (an apartment building complex that looks like Lego land, in Yehlahanka). lends itself to the vision I have of the future. One where the trees are planted in exact distances from each other, there are hardly any people seen, yet traces that they live there exist like the cars parked in the parking lot. The protagonist exists in both worlds, and through the narrative that takes us between these worlds, the worlds seem to come together at a point where it gets confusing for the viewer to distinguish which is real and which is not.

The Story (Tentative…continues to change…so lets just look at it as an idea)

In the future, where we have become immersed in online worlds, a young man lives his life like everybody else. He walks around, goes clubbing, attends exhibitions in the virtual space, relaxes on the beach etc.

The film opens with him before he enters a club.

(Real Life video): It gets established that he is alone and is entering alone. In this space he sees people dancing, and spots this one girl in the crowd with a tattoo of a crow on her back. This symbol stirs something in him, something that he cannot remember. He eventually leaves that space, drunk and walks outside and looks up at the night sky.

(Second Life video): Staring up into the night, from his point of view we fly up and it transitions to day time clouds and mist. The camera comes down and in the clouds we see an exhibition space floating in the sky. He attends a photography exhibition there. The images he finds himself looking at are of death and a landscape that has only traces of life left in it. He continues walking through the space and finally stands in front of an image of a crow, buried in the ground, covered with dirt and soil. He keeps looking at this image, staring at it. At this point he meets a dwarf; the dwarf is the artist/photographer whose exhibition it is.

(Real Life video): The man is seen sleeping, his eyes open. He wakes up, opens his window, looks outside drinking his coffee and smoking a cigarette. Outside you see a Lego land road, perfectly aligned. His doorbell rings and a delivery man delivers a parcel of something that looks like a large painting.

We see the man sitting on a sofa, in a very white, minimal living room, looking up at the image of the crow buried in the ground, that he has already hung up on his wall. He looks at his clock, that strikes 9:00.

(Second Life video) An extreme top shot, coming down through the clouds we see a man walking on the beach, as we get closer we see it is the same man we saw at the exhibition (the protagonist). We then see the dwarf sitting at a table that the man joins him at. They have a conversation here.

Man: Why meet here? It’s so secluded, not a soul for miles…

Dwarf: Why not, look at the view. Listen to those birds.

Man: [Half smiles and turns to look at the view]… it is quite lovely.

Dwarf: [after a pause] So tell me you and crows… what is it? The connection I mean…

Man: I don’t know. I can’t remember. Everytime I see a crow I feel like I’m forgetting something. Something important. Something I shouldn’t have forgotten.

Dwarf: [with a small smile on his face] That’s a lot of importance given to something you cannot even remember. Why is it so important to remember?

Man: I don’t know… [pause] I feel like something died. Something inside me. [pause] And you?

Dwarf: Maybe it is my duty to remind people of death so they can live.

Man: [gives him a quizzical look…]

The Dwarf, which will be revealed later, is part of an underground group of people that chooses individuals to help them remember the life and connection with the natural world they have lost. The Dwarf, taps into the memory of the protagonist’s childhood, a memory that lies hidden and asleep. Through his photographs and art he takes him through a journey that eventually makes the protagonist remember his childhood and a relationship he had lost. He manages to remember playing as a child with a little girl and with the help of the dwarf finds the girl he used to play with, who too is lost in the virtual world. The fragmented memory that is gnawed at repeatedly in the film is one where the two children bury a dead crow and the girl sings a song to the bird after its burial.

I have not yet decided what will happen in the end, and much of the story is still to be figured out.

References/ Inspiration and Resources

I have been going through various websites, projects, films and books that have inspired me and influenced me. Some of them are listed ahead with a small explanation.

We Feel Fine (www.wefeelfine.org/)

- A new media project by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar

‘Started in August 2005, We Feel Fine is a program that harvests human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)

As a result you get a database of several million human feelings.’

This data then allows you to for example see which city was the happiest city in the world at any given point in time. You can also click on the link of the blog and enter the online world of the person who wrote the line.

The Suicide Club

- A film by Sion Sono (2002)

This film deals with Japanese popular culture. It depicts through a series of creepy dark visuals and twisted narrative the scary truth about the youth of Japan. The central theme of the film is inspired from the mass suicides that are taking place in Japan. There are suicide clubs, and cults that form over the internet, and often these suicides are referred to as cybercides.

The Man Without a Head (L’Homme sans tete)

- A film by Juan Solanas (2003)

This film inspired me because of its mesmerizing visual quality. The visuals speak of a time period that is in the future, yet decadent, old and empty with traces of industrial waste. A visual translation I had been thinking about much before watching this film, this film has helped me to dream more.

Films and videos by Michel Gondry

(The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; The Science of Sleep; Let Forever Be; Around the World and more)

Gondry’s work has inspired me and made me think a great deal. He too uses human actors to perform what machines do. The human error as well as the perfection in the representation of the machine is partly what is so beautiful about his work. The way Gondry depicts dreams and creates sets is also something that I gain inspiration from.

The Fifth Element

- A film by Luc Besson (1997)

The Fifth Element is a film set in the future. Its interesting to see how they have predicted how cities will look and space will be organized. The set design and special effects in this film are commendable, considering the film was made in the late 90’s.

Other references are:

Reality Bites and article about Second Life from The Newsweek

Always – on / Always – on you: The Tethered Self, a paper by Sherry Turkle

Numerous chat rooms and web sites on the internet

Learning Outcomes

I hope to gain a better understanding of the subject I have chosen. Alongside I hope to understand and pull off what it takes to make a successful online film!

Ah an attempt at filmmaking!

Today I tried to make a little film....
I shot and then put whatever I had into Windows Movie Maker, a primitive editing software...
I still haven't figured out how to get the sound but I shall as I continue to experiment...the sound here has been downloaded from the net.. (different sound samples.)

Here is a link to the little movie...called: The Hawk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDai6otjPH8

Some snapshots from the film:

Animating and getting my Avatar to Evoke...

After taking so many pictures I decided to try to animate my avatar myself...

The following are youtube links to the first experiments...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DNm8RtEwDM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVyJFKpoYqQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPwhAHItcpA

I explored...

I now had discovered that there are many places in SL where you can find free things...
wings...hair...hairstyles....joints...cigarettes...
doors...windows...booze....etc...

I also discovered that you can animate your avatar by simple being in a particular location and touching something or sittin on it... or in it. (I also went in a plane...but didn't take any pictures)
for example I rode on a cow.... danced in a club..moved my arms about in some sort of zen type meditation stance...did Taichi...

As time went by...

Snapshpots...

Birth...

I was born in second life, rather i was spawned in Second Life a few weeks back...
I had only read and heard about it at that time. What i read shocked me.
You have to buy property with real money, you can go clubbing, be in a relationship with someone across the world, have sex with them(ahem 3D virtual sex...I'm still disagreeable to the whole thing), drink, smoke, fly.... attend virtual classes in virtual classrooms, teach, get a job, earn money.
And while you do all this guess what.... you can record it and make movies....

This form of filmmaking is called Machinima...

"Machinima history is difficult to grasp. While its roots can clearly be traced back to the early days of the demo scene in the 1980, actual storytelling and public distribution did not take place until the technology was ready for it. Thus, machinima history is bound to certain game releases and the technological
developments in the gaming sector. "
(http://www.zeitbrand.de/machiniBlog/WhatIsMachinima.html)

I got excited, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I am still seduced by the form and the largeness of the whole thing.

In my first day in Second Life I walked around looking at things, I tried flying and most importantly created my avatar : Spray Oceanlane.

Spray looks a lot like me in my Real Life (RL). Creating her was almost like still life drawing, where you are trying to represent something as realistically as the medium allows you to.
I still have a long way to go to look like me, but then its a start.

When you're born you have no clothes. In the beginning you decide if you're going to have a male avatar or a female avatar, so I have boobs but nothing else...
On my first day I set about making clothes for myself. And this is funny..
I made underwear, and then I made the rest. You can never really see your underwear because your clothes are on top, like in real life... only this is a 3D virtual avatar so who gives a shit about underwear right?! Actually who gives a shit about clothes!!!

BUT YOU DO!

And that's the thing, you can spend hours on SL indulging in yourself, how you want to look, what you want to wear to the minutest of details. And this indulgence gets quite addictive.
Now to get clothes there are two ways... make them, or buy them... actually there are three...
find them.
The currency in SL is the Linden Dollar, Linden because thats the name of the guy who came up with the damn thing.... anyhow so many Linden Dollars make up 1 US Dollar... and I say so many because its a fluctuating exchange rate, depending on the market everyday...!

So now I care about what I look like, what I wear, what my hair looks like etc...

And funnily enough the day I was born I found myself a quiet beachy place where there were no people... here I decided to make clothes for myself etc.
Anyhow the sun began to set at a particular time (SL has it's own time) so I find myself thinking 'hey let's go check out the sunset!' (CHECK OUT THE SUNSET?! A FUCKING VIRTUAL SUN!)
anyhow I get up and start walking up this cliff/hill type thing, and I go up and see someone standing there, a woman with a gown blowing in the wind and all...
I say to myself oh my god I'm naked!!! I dont have pants (nevermind the fact that I dont have much else either) I start running down to hide myself under the cliff and make pants!
At the point I have turned into a dark chocolate brown color because of the fading light... here is when I figure that you can force the sun to come up. (But I think that's just your point of view, at any point you can revert back to the actual time setting)

The whole day there I spent making myself look a certain way. I hardly spoke to anyone.
And I didn't even know how to sit. So I stood wherever I went or I flew.
:)

I realized that much like in films where we fill in the gaps, we also do it here. I figured that everything that makes us react is drawing on a memory hidden somewhere in our minds.
When we relate to something like the sun setting by the beach it is because we have seen it before and experienced it. The image has a starting point...

Anyhow I've written enough... here are some pictures...

Introduction

My name is Nupur Mathur and I am a final year film student at the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology in Bangalore...

As for my diploma project I decided to make a film about people's real lives and their virtual lives, about how the two spaces can get mixed up and confused. How in the future, we might not be able to tell the difference.

In the beginning I saw Second Life, (a 3D virtual world) as something extremely bizaare, pointless, dangerous and funny. The premise for my diploma came from there, that we are moving away from the natural world because technology is taking us on a different path.
This path I did not agree with. Then I thought, maybe there is no path that we are supposed to be on. And by me saying technology is unhealthy beyond a point, it will not change the fact that it will continue to grow and develop everyday.

I also began thinking, if there are ten million people in Second Life already, there has got to be something about the place that is beautiful, exciting and worth the time.

This is the beginning of my journey.