Wednesday was exhausting for ridiculous reasons, but there's still time to look at this beautifully rendered Pride-themed laser sword machina by the master, Teal Aurelia. Fairly unique among SL machinima creators, Teal lovingly (and painstakingly) captures raw footage shot in Second Life, then heavily post-processes it, usually to great effect and transformation. (I particularly love how we also see the after glow of the blades, conveying a real sense of heft and substance.)
I profiled Teal last year, who gave me a glimpse of her background, and her impressive process:
Sequences like the spinning light saber, I had to animate by hand, frame by frame, so 3 seconds of video took an entire day to edit. But I'm used to working on that timescale, because I come from an animation background, and making a few seconds of film in a day as an animator is a success.
It’s pretty heavily edited. I use AfterEffects to add shadows and rim-lighting and do color grading. It’s a lot quicker to do it all in post rather than fussing with lights in a viewer. I've managed to get a few blogger friends to open After Effects instead of Photoshop sometimes. There are a lot of things it does so much quicker.
And yes, the swords started as old school katanas in Second Life!
Are there other machinimas not to be missed?
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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