Making Humanosaur

Humanosaur from Roxi Khan [Rocksea Renegade] on Vimeo.

Roxi Khan writes about HUMANOSAUR:

A DINOSAUR OF A TRAILER

Over the years I have found Second Life an excellent platform for a filming format called 'Machinima'. That's because its free to sign up for, it's fairly cheap to film there and plus you are only limited by your imagination, you really can do almost anything you want in there!

With this trailer I wanted to take advantage of the idea of being able to produce something that doesn't exist (i.e. dinosaurs!) and to be able to play around with some camera angles that would be otherwise difficult to obtain in real life. Best of all, you don't have to necessarily beg your best friends to play a role they don't want to - you can create 'alts', basically extra avatars that you can control yourself. I usually find it easier this way because I don't end up feeling guilty about taking up too much of someone's time, either that or boring to them to death while I check over the footage to see if the shot came out ok!

To do machinima you need to have a movie capture program on your desktop to capture any onscreen action within Second Life. Since I'm on a Mac I use a program called 'iShowU' which didn't cost an awful lot, in fact most capture programs are either free or cost just a little money, so there should be no problem finding one to suit your operating system.

There is an ever growing machinima community within Second Life, to a point where there is now a 'Second Life Machinima Artists Guild' (SL MAG) set up. Here people wishing to learn more about the craft, or would just like to share their works and techniques, can come to this group for advice at http://slmachinimaarts.ning.com/ . So if you're ever looking to get into this area and are around in SL look me up, my virtual identity is Rocksea Renegade.

Since I am keen to become a film trailer editor, as a serious career, I spent the last couple of years creating several game trailers through this method for a company in Second Life called 'MadPea Productions'. Who by the way have awesome games there...sorry couldn't resist the plug! Hehe. Anyway, I am now hoping to make the transition to film trailer editor and entering this contest has been a brilliant opportunity to expand on my showreel. So thank you IMTF!