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Botgirl and I gave the opening keynote for the fourth annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference in Second Life. I don’t know if we’ll be invited to co-host the next Academy Awards show, but we had a lot of fun. Our presentation starts at about 5:00 into the video.
I had a great time as a guest on the Metanomics Community Form show. Here’s the vid.
The “Inside The Avatar Studio” show I participated in earlier this month just came out on rezzed.tv. I (through my fourworlds Ra avatar) was one of a five member Second Life panel discussing the potential impact of the “avatar” movie on the future of virtual worlds.
The first five minutes were pretty rough. I started off blasting eardrums with an overly-hot microphone setting. Once that was fixed, I must have accidentally turned off push-to-talk, so my heavy breathing was audible whenever I wasn’t talking.
Once I made it through those early technical issues the show went well. Panelists Phelan Corrimal (Kevin Feenan), Beyers Sellers (Robert Bloomfield), Dirk Talamasca and Doubledown Tandino and I had some very interesting conversations about the movie, virtual worlds and technology.
Nevertheless, I decided to edit my own rambling performance on the show down to a couple minutes of coherent communication. For a little dramatic impact, I whipped up a loop-based sound bed and threw in some clips from the movie and a small trippy effect section. I ended up with pretty fun 2 1/2 minute music video I titled “fourworlds on Avatar”:
Here is the video with the full show:
Botgirl vs. Human Trailer: The Motion Comic Version. I’m starting to really feel for Edgar Bergen, may he rest in peace. Sharing a household with a larger-than-life figment of your imagination, be it dummy or avatar, has its ups and downs. You can read her take on the situation on her blog. Although plans for a real world shoot of our reality show concept have been delayed, we put together this motion comic trailer to keep the idea moving forward.
Moving ideas from an initial concept to a shared vision is one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of both my vocational and avocational work. Over the last few years, I’ve transitioned from words to visuals earlier and earlier in the process. Since my drawing skill is not much beyond stick-figure level, I use a combination of drag and drop visualization applications to not only communicate ideas, but also to express and refine insights that are actually gained through the work of visualization.
These are some of the tools I’ve been using recently to created animated sketchpad-level visualization. All have relatively low learning curves and all allow one to rapidly move from inner thought to shareable artifact:
Here’s a little video sketch that was slammed together in a couple of hours yesterday morning using BoinxTV and Motion, with materials previously created with FrameForce, Second Life and the iPhone. The use of “Avatars Everywhere” as the theme and slogan didn’t emerge until about halfway through the production.
