Here’s the latest luminously gobsmacking Second Life machinima from Teal Aurelia (first profiled here) and this time, it’s seriously epic.
It also happens to be an ad for an SL-based brand: In this case, Crack Den, the long-running urban roleplay mini-MMO, and Teal’s precise visuals allude to the game’s detailed backstory right from the start:
“I had to do a ton of research about Crack Den because I’d never roleplayed there, and the more I read, the more annoyed I was that I hadn’t known the scale of its worldbuilding sooner,” as Teal teals me.
So instead of shooting random locations in the game world which spans 10 sims — i.e. over 1.5 square miles / 2.5km — she focused on its larger narrative:
“This is a ten sim fictional world rising out of Hurricane Katrina [where] players can be anything. I wanted a video with more characters than I’d ever attempted to film before, and none of them would be definitively good or bad; they’re just surviving.” (And surviving oh so sexily.)
Crack Den is managed by lead developer Nadir Taov — who I hope to chat with soon — and who gave Teal broad creative latitude on the machinima:
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 