Starfish: Mixed Reality Live on Stage

The Y Touring Theatre Company asked us to make machinima clips for part of the live action in their Starfish production.  As you can see in this photo the actress, Danielle Calvert, playing Shannon uses a laptop and headset to interact with the virtual world as part of the drama. The set is a giant laptop and the scenes from our areas shot on the Second Life grid are projected on the screen. It is a very original concept and the show is great.

The show is being presented right now through March 13th across the UK to the 14+ audience. One of the goals is to educate teens about the issues around clinical medical trials.  It's an engaging way to make a not so exciting topic relevant for people. The show ends and then there are some cool survey type gadgets used to spark debate and discussions. This whole program was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The playwright Judith Johnson really got into the whole virtual world thing.  My favorite line on this topic was the teacher saying to the shy art student that virtual world was "like practice for the real world." The shy student then said something later about how would the teacher know about being shy and using an avatar to become more confident at which point the teacher responded something like " well, maybe in this digital world I am not confident at all."

You may also notice that our Immortal Avatar created from the real swedish model Mary Mayhem was used as the avatar star in the machinimas. The matching poney tails was a great touch. This is a new twist on voice acting? Yes, you can be young, beautiful and famous forever. In fact you can do all of that and never even know it?

Check out some of the clips that I jammed together in this vid below (and sorry Nat Ninetails--the voice part is not at all macho to go with your most xlent tough guy look! In the show they do the voice live at it is a guy.)

Big thanks to my associate producer in making the machinimas--Meral (aka Lokum). It took hours and burned through all of our collective patience, but we pulled it off!  Thanks again for hanging in there with me.

We learned a lot about trying to make the avatars more expressive btw. The biggest issue is working with a fairly limited set of facial expressions. Oddly in many ways the non-human avatars can be more expressive--with doing less even. But if someone could build a animation control panel that allowed detailed movement of the face, eyes, body parts independently and then back again as a set--well...call me let's lunch on that one!

Wanna make your own machinimas? Check out our checklist here for things to remember to do.