What am I left with... what do I leave you with?

In the end I conclude, I don’t think I’ll get onto second life after this project. It was fun, no doubt, but beyond a point, second life is pretty depressing and pointless. There isn’t much to do and most of second life is about sex that it might as well be called sex life!
:)
I think my biggest problem with second life is that it is trying to be real life. I find it so funny that in a world, where you can fly, and get rid of a system of consumption and money, we’d come right back to it. It becomes a place where you live out fantasies of being what you can’t in the real world. Second life gives you a sense of power and control because it mimics reality… only it is not reality. I found that in Second life you are faced with the same issues as those in real life. For example, popularity, money, having a group of friends, someone to love, getting a job, owning a large house, a cool car... An important thing to note is that there is no real consequence. It’s a safe place to be. Unlike the real world where your actions have consequences, in second life you can get away with being rude, ignoring people, being someone you’re not, looking like anything you want. I think the behavior of people and the space really says something about human beings. We’re a type of being that is so aware of itself that it spends hours indulging in itself. Seems to me there is something inherently human, a nature a want and desire to be stronger or more powerful or more in control. It is funny how when we’re given the choice of a new world, we’d just repeat ourselves with old systems and values. If you think about it the real world provides us with examples of what is happening in second life. It’s a two way street. Plastic surgery to get the nose you want, liposuction to lose weight, spending hours shopping, changing your hair color to changing your skin color…. its all happening.
Given the choice between the two worlds I’d choose real life any day because I value uncertainty and I value death. If aspects like age, growing old, dirt and struggle go missing, life isn’t really worth living, not to me at least.

The Edit... adding and subtracting...

I started editing little encounters and conversations. I felt however, that they were very disjointed. There were no transitions in between scenes, and no real story carrying the film through. I began to panic and decided to write a structured fiction story based on my experiences. I wrote out a sequence of events that showed the progression of my character Spray as she immerses herself in the world of Second Life. This however, over time I realized wasn’t working either. This is because Spray now started to seem like some artificial intelligence that had a life of her own independent of me, the player behind the screen. This wasn’t feeling right and I sat down and looked at the way the earlier edits were working and translating my experience in second life vs. the new version. A combination of the two seemed to work. I re-structured the narrative and began a new edit.

I realized that on one hand I was trying to depict a honest representation of my experience. On the other hand I was trying to translate a larger phenomenon, a state of being, and its possible repercussions. How to do both I was finding difficult, however, have managed to some extent I think.
On another note, a huge obstacle I had to tackle was sound. None of my second life footage had sound because the program I used to grab footage did not record sound! So with a silent film, a meticulous searching for sound, and sound effects began. The image transformed on the edit with music and sound added to it. For example the sound of the keyboard while someone is typing. Or the sound of the sea and the waves in a location by the sea.

I also tried a series of tests merging different types of imagery. For one I tried using real life footage with second life footage. I wanted to see what would happen if I used real eyes merged with the face of my second life character. The results made the avatar look spooky in a nice way. I also used footage of myself from when I was a child, embedded into a television in second life. Spray watching T.V sees her past in the screen and seems to get sad. The results were quite powerful and emotional.

Over time I began to feel like the film still lacked something. I felt it was the lack of a real world local context. Somewhere the player, the real world Nupur had to come out. For an audience one would wonder, who is this avatar? Where is this girl coming from? I thought inter-cutting between my real world self and second life self would result in a more holistic representation. Another reason for my making this decision was that there were moments I reflected upon second life that I wanted to include in the film but could not show through second life. I decided to script out little sequences I would cut to between second life scenes. I felt that I wasn’t talking about second life as such but a larger phenomenom of connectivity, social networking and communication. Included in this is also your mobile phone, your email, facebook, and numerous other ‘avatars’ one has.

The style of this filming I decided would be seemingly non-fiction, as if its really happening, only its structured. I think my inspiration for this comes from the popular ‘webisode’ Lonelygirl15, aired on Youtube. Lonelygirl15 is the result of a new dimension of reality T.V or ‘non-fiction,’ that is not real, rather it is a construct that takes great effort to appear as if real.