Wagner James Au / New World Notes

This lovely machinima montage of an SL sim called Still Water Village (click here to teleport) was shot with the Firestorm viewer on high graphics using the region's shared environment WindLight. But from the moment you press play, you'll also likely notice a unique and appealing fluidity to the shots.

That's because this is not Second Life machinima as it's usually defined. Instead, explains creator HaileyNicole Resident, it's actually a series of screenshots she made, animated with PixVerse, a gen AI program.

"It touches nothing but her movement and what it thinks her clothes look like unless I tell it to add something like the dogs," Hailey tells me. "Usually I can have a mixture of SL clips and AI-animated clips, but this one was strictly animated in-world photos."

To create the individual clips, she feeds the SL screenshots into PixVerse (launched in January 2024), and gave the platform some prompt instructions — see below:

"I usually have to do it a few times with different variations to get something I like. And I usually use prompts [of items] that are already in the image."

The final result is a pretty impressive, wile addressing a fundamental problem with making SL machinima: While Second Life has a huge universe of great content and environments, it is almost impossible to shoot motion at an extremely high frame rate to get footage that's professional-level animation. (All that streaming, you know.) It's also a unique mix of human-driven art and gen AI, with Hailey taking the well-lit, beautifully composed screenshots herself, then editing them into a unified whole.

Despite that, not everyone welcomes alterations of SL content with AI. In fact, when this video was posted to /SecondLife on Reddit, it ran afoul of the subreddit's rules prohibiting gen AI, and was pulled. (Despite being highly upvoted and praised.)

"For me, AI is simply a tool to enhance Second Life content and bring the stories I want to tell to life," she tells me. "But if people feel strongly about not wanting AI in SL content, I think that’s completely valid too. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. At the end of the day, I’ll still use it, because it’s what helps me express the vision I have in my head."

And the debate over using AI, or how to label it as a genre, is still in flux among many reators:

"A friend of mine makes award-winning Second Life machinima, and he insists my content counts as machinima because I still create the story, the idea, and put in the work to build the video. But personally, I don’t feel comfortable calling it machinima, because I have so much respect for the creators who spend countless hours making full productions using only SL content."

That's a conversation for another time! As for other creators inspired by Hailey Nicole's technique blending screenshots with PixVerse, here's her starting tips:

"[J]ust play with it. Don’t expect it to be perfect. Like I’ve said, I usually have to try a few times for each picture until I get something I like. And sometimes I can just crop the animation into something that works for me instead of using the whole clip. "

She also has some tips for dealing with complaints about using gen AI:

"[I]f it becomes fun for you, then why do the naysayers matter? We all use Second Life and media in various different creative ways. It’s okay for yours to be out of the norm and different.

"Just always be transparent and open about it."

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