"Machinima is entirely a playercreated
phenomenon; it’s not really something that developers of
games ever set out to do or to provide.”
-Henry Lowood
Justice: The Story behind Severe Haircut Lady
When we were first assigned this project, I thought Marc was crazy. And then after our class had our Second Life introduction with Gloria, I though he was insane. There was no way I, with the help of three other people, was going to be able to produce a three to five minute machinima production and publish it on YouTube. Absolutely No Way! Walking out of the multi-media lab, I was just overwhelmed and stressed out.
Then we had our first group meeting. We spent a couple hours together and accomplished nothing. It took us a few days to just to get our characters the way we wanted them to look and spent those days only filming walking. I was so happy to get the email from Marc saying we had a week extension. My group was not going to finish the film in one week, and I don’t think any other group was going to either.
By the second week, our group was starting to make a lot of progress and improvement. It was also nice because Kat was a good director and knew how she wanted to present her script. She knew the impression and response she wanted to get back from the audience. Kat gave very good feedback throughout the whole production of the film which made it easier for us all as a team.
Filming was actually something that I really enjoyed. I liked filming the same scene from many different angles. I learned how important angles were. By having a lot of different angles when editing allowed for us to choose the best one that expressed the feelings in the scene. But when we finally started to edit our hours and hours worth of clips, I felt a sense of achievement. We were actually starting to get somewhere and it was turning out as Kat had hoped. I think we all felt proud that our hard work was getting somewhere.
I also really enjoyed the script that Kat wrote. It was at typical piece of fan fiction- taking a character from a story and building a background for her- in our case, sever haircut lady. She is such a harsh character in the novel “Little Brother” and leaves readers with negative feelings towards her. But after the production of our film, it left me of a better understanding of why sever haircut lady is way she is, and I hope that others felt this way too.
Learning how to work Second Life and getting used to the virtual world was not an easy thing to do. I have never had any experience in virtual worlds so it was all brand new to me. Filming, editing, doing voice overs and adding music were all new to me also. Just the whole assignment was foreign and different than anything I had ever done which was also part of the reason why I felt Marc was so crazy. But we did finish the project, along with every other group, and it really was a great accomplishment for me. I honestly did not think I would ever be able to do something like that. I also think that it is something that I would use in future assignments or projects for other classes.