So….lots going on this coming Sunday, March 25th starting at the early hour of 6am!! That is the hour we, the machinima makers of Second Life who have an entry in the Slartist@UWA Machinima Challenge will be up and chewing our fingernails at, and sad to say, perhaps the very last awards of this kind. If you follow this blog to some degree, you know that we have not done very well with judges in the past. This is a new year, so anything is possible, but no matter what, all of us involved know we have a good film, and we are proud of it. Whatever happens at the Awards, happens, but hopefully we will all be there, including Silas whose art was the inspiration for our film. See Post:The River of Forgetting. If you enjoy getting up early on Sundays, we would love to have you sitting with us:) After the awards are announced, we will take a few hours out to cry or joyously jump up and down;) and then we have a PARTY at Kari’s Bar and Dance in its new location: LINC Island..no matter how we do… we will CELEBRATE!!
Poster by Natascha Randt
For this party, we have the really fabulous (I mean really!) DJ Outlaw spinning,Blues, Country and Zydeco for your listening and dancing pleasure. It is the same Kari’s Bar and Dance that has been in existence in New Toulouse for 9 years now!!
We brought it home to our city in the sky, LINC City, to grace our streets and Entertainment District. The same great ambiance, same great people, and a super duper dance ball to enjoy it all. For those of you that remember the New Toulouse days, the iconic Harley’s Hotel that used to be across from Kari’s has once again moved and is across the street.. again!! Just like old times. Welcome back Harley on LINC Island!!
I invite you all to join us for some great music and high spirits..Please put it on your calendars (avatars are sooo forgetful) and party with us for 2 hours 12noon slt-2pm. The LM will take you to our sim below, where you will find another teleport, so just choose Kari’s Bar and Dance and Voilá you will be at the door! Please plan on exploring the city that was just about single-handedly created by Natascha! It has so many cool places, a park, and great places for pictures…
Hope to see you on Sunday, March 25th at Kari’s Bar and Dance…and if you are up early…send us a good luck wish for the Ceremony:) and…if somehow I didn’t nudge you hard enough to see our entry…here it is to watch before Sunday:)
Tour me in a roadster convertible…I’m all and only yours today. We can watch the cane fields burning down to the ground, while we’re living the dream , and it’s your dream that you planted, right here inside my mind, just waiting to be found.
Drive me around with the top down, we can wave back at the wheat. I smell the wildflowers mixed with horses breath and blackened earth. Not a soul to be seen, just you and me and the scenery… the car humming along, knowing that, here comes the rebirth.
So take me for a drive , I don’t care where, just climb us up to the mountain top, to hear the whispering bells, and drop me off where the crows look down and the smokey clouds and haze paint those rural pastels.
I hear there’s a garden there that I really should see. It has a little girl, sitting at her daddy’s feet, always asking “why?” Between the night and nowhere is where it seems they want to be, and the answers that she seeks are written in the sky.
Machinery hums, the cattle call, gears shift down to first. If you hear a cicada singing, you know you’re still alive. The whistling wind turns chill and blows and parts my hair, while the narrow winding mountain pass thrills and terrifies.
I know and so do you, that from this scorched earth, a little seedling grows. In a fever dream or a burnt down meadow, we can see the new seeds being sown. Those roaming grey clouds are going to let it rain any time now, any day… I could ride with you forever, and let it rain, ‘cuz I’m just not ready yet.. to head for home.
So, tour me in a roadster convertible…I’m all and only yours today. We can watch the cane fields burning down to the ground, while we’re living the dream , and it’s your dream that you planted, right here inside my mind… this fertile ground.
Karima Hoisan March 6, 2018 Between The Night and Nowhere
Kitely – Virtual Worlds on Demand
Click on the title-link below to hear it recited to the music that inspired it: “Dodd’s Shakedown” by Jeff Russo and the Prague Philharmonic Fargo Season 2 Crows Look Down
Driving down a familiar highway day in day out One day…the scenery changes; the weather turns to winter and the wheel chills your hands In the middle of the summer. No warning signs…no yellow roadblocks High white clouds exit… Stormy Wedgwood – blue ones roll in, taking their place. Flocks of crows in the treetops,
look down suddenly on your rooftop. Are you dreaming? Are you crazy?
Should you have knowntoday was the day? You feel that flutter of colorless butterflies The question you ask… “Should I stay in my car and keep driving?” Maybe it will all make sense around this next bend… and really, you have no choice now Winter has snowed you to a crawl, but you can’t survive, if you get out.
My Ridgeback stalks the front lawn. Stands on point, I sit back to empathize
Squirrels are Hershey bars that temptingly zoom out of reach. We have not eaten sweets in a month
Their tails dangling tauntingly, furry Eskimo Pies, chocolate side down, the sticks in the air.
Why talk about cruelty or the bloody shame? They are just a pair of creamy whims that fly and tease a meter overhead.
So marshmellowy, our stomachs rumble. We run behind, leaping up into low branches.. Now we’re falling, open paws, empty-handed. Frustrated saliva, like bitter leaves nothing left to do but woof woof…woof
Hope is Found inspired by the painting by Silas Merlin “The End of Hope”
Born and raised on a distant shore… The world was not as kind as I had thought it would be. Still, I was the child who found hope in almost anything, and saved butterflies, and ants drowning in puddles. I nurtured hurt birds, because I understood at too early an age the fleeting chances I’d be given to make a difference and how quickly my youth could just disappear into the fog of the past.
Sometimes I transplanted a little shoot that struggled to grow, in the sand between the bricks of the path. I carefully uprooted and replanted it in fertile rich soil. I had hopes it would thrive and I rewarded it for being brave, for staying alive, long enough for me to find it. I tried to faithfully visit this flower from time to time, just to see how it was doing, if it was still surviving.
I noticed when I observed it, how we were much the same; inside we had our vitality which was an essence, akin to magic. Inside we would grow up exactly as our patterns ordained a paint-by-numbers, that was filling in all on its own. I was the child growing taller and more compassionate and aware. It was the flower, shooting up and coming into its bloom. How we both needed each other, to get to this moment. That’s where I found hope, sitting between us.
The past came for lunch today one after another they sat in chairs at the dining room table that was set for less and so some stools and some odd chairs were added until we were all sitting down. There was much expectation.. I saw everyone smiling because the past had come for lunch today and met up with now at the dining room table…right now making new memories…that sometime in the future would be great ones to remember from the past.
Each carried a bridge that they laid down straight to my heart and the memories flowed over it and laughter skipped over it and heaping plates of rice with chicken, were shuffled back and forth on the magical conveyor belt below the girders. Then our mouths opened for talking and our mouths opened for laughter and our mouths opened for eating.
We marveled that we were still coherent and alive still in the same country still connected after years of silence and it felt like … just like Time had stopped then jerked us into the present, which was now… which was at this dining room table of laughter and good food… and it was like no time had gone by and it was also like we had missed so many lifetimes forgot to make more memories too busy in our daily lives to try to even do a few.
By the time coffee was served We had agreed this must happen once again… make memories not only recall them… There was still time and we all wanted to. So we agreed on a date, and even a menu and our eyes sparkled in mirth and irony… because we realized we had just invited the past to come back again into the future.
From LINC Islandwith love and best wishes
for a healthy, happy and creative2018!! From (left to right)Karima-Odracir-Natascha (Joey is missing:(
The LINC Islanders!! (LINC Island in SL since 2006:) Love and great hopes for the New Year!
I think I will begin by showing you our movie:) This is the 25th collaboration for Randt & Hoisan,also known as The Team:) Please enjoy it in HD and Fullscreen and then if you are interested in a bit of the history on making it.. keep reading below.
I could write a book about the making of this movie..but I think I’m too lazy; nevertheless, there are things that need to be said about this one..for the record and just to look back on years from now and remember the trials and errors and breakthroughs and near breakdowns we all lived through while making it.
I have revisited some of my other posts about our entries for the UWA and it seems I am always saying..that this one or that one was the most complicated etc etc, but objectively, I think “The River of Forgetting” wins that prize hands down! It was soooooo complicated to make this movie..that sometimes I felt really crazy..I would lose my concentration and would just stand there thinking…whaaat?
One of the factors that made this difficult was that we filmed about 95% of this machinima on Kitely-Virtual Worlds on Demand. It is a a great compliment to the Kitely machinery, that it was even possible. OpenSim in general, and Kitely in particular is stable enough and powerful enough to be able to shoot a movie of this caliber, get ample fps and be able to fill a world with many prims. It would not have been possible, even a few years ago.
The Beginning of an idea..and a world…July 2017
The other very complicated thing we had with this movie, is that Nat made the mesh clothes for the avatars to wear. The avatars themselves had to have the same body shape, height, hair in Kitely as they did in the intro shot and also backstory scenes that were shot in Second Life. We had to have rigged mesh clothes to wear and unrigged mesh clothes to throw. We had to have some unrigged clothes to throw that were physical, but we also needed non-physical unrigged clothes to add my swirling textures and make them disappear with a script. Just keeping this wardrobe together, remembering what had a script, what had textures, what was to go into a cannon and be catapulted in an arc into the water just as an avatar was throwing it folded up… was all very complicated to say the least.
No littering of the river….everything that fell in was dissolved by little river creatures
We had some textures that were triggered by just landing on the water, others, we had to write /99108 and others we had to write /99107.We had to bring in bvh motion capture animations and alter them and make our own tossing and throwing animations that would look close enough to the real thing. The main thing is that all the fading and disappearing and swirling were done in real time. Each had to be coordinated to the ship, moving away, the cannon lobbing clothes, the avatars dropping their backpacks or tossing their jackets. We never used particles…all the special effects were done with rotating textures…and I think in the end, it worked! Dale and I earned our SFX credit by working closely together and texturing each piece of clothing, each picture, each knapsack that fell into the water.
It doesn’t look like a lot, when you see it in the film, but it got so confusing, our workshop was scattered all over a lawn, and half the time I didn’t even know what was what..linked? unlinked? scripted? unscripted? We even had a hard time figuring out when we could get our little foursome together for shoots and it was what started us using the expressions “rigged and unrigged time” that everyone learned to understand somehow..and we managed to pull off our shoots in both Sl and Kitely with some kind of schedule….and much laughter…and much unrigged time:) I think we went through daylight savings, but then some of us (the unrigged ones..didn’t) Apart from almost coming unrigged myself during the process, it was a lot of fun too and Nat got to do some very innovative filming. I hope you will agree.
Now to the star of our video! The undisputed star is Silas Merlin’s gorgeous and colorful pastel boat entitled “Funerary Ship” Silas made this movie possible by allowing us to take his SL Art Work off the grid and permit us to import it into Kitely, where I had the possibility of building a sim just for it and our UWA project.
Silas’s Ship arrives on Kitely – Virtual Worlds on Demand
It was a moment of rejoicing for Nat & I
Nat, meanwhile, was building an SL set for the beginning of our film, while I was making the Kitely set.
Nat’s beginning of her set for our film in SL
We worked closely with Silas and he was willing to give us the textures he used on the ship, so Nat could make avatars from them, and I could make a landing ballet tent for the final dance. This movie would have absolutely been impossible to make, if it weren’t for Silas’s total cooperation and willingness to help.
Interestingly, when I first saw the Ship at the UWA and told Nat about it, I thought we could use a poem I already had that I recited to the music of the composer, David Darling. It was about that final ride, down the river Lethe, and it was about death and crossing over to the final shore. Before I read Silas’s “About My Entry,” we had begun to work on this idea and I even wrote to David Darling and asked permission to use his music “Untold Stories” (which miraculously he gave me:) but by then..I read Silas’s motivation and….well it changed EVERYTHING. I had to find new music, write a new poem and align our movie with the artist’s reasons for creating his art piece. This was something so new for both Nat and I..but we flowed with it and I am so happy we did. The music,”Between Worlds” by Roger Subirana Mata gave me “goosebumps” the first and the 100th time I heard it. It is an amazingly emotional and beautiful piece of work, and I bought a license to use it on YouTube from Jamendo for this project. Once again, Dale Innis was instrumental in moving our boat and all the scripts we used to make our special effects. Without his help, we could not have pulled this off. I’d love to have a $ for every time I said, “Nat, you’re going to kill me..but…butt…” We literally changed horses (or ideas) in midstream and listened to the soundtrack and tried to just…”let it go”
Negotiating with the Captain
Last but not least, a very heart-felt thank you to our wonderful cast. They showed up when we needed them and most importantly, were so much fun when we filmed them, both in SL and Kitely in both rigged and unrigged Time too:) Nat and I have it very clear and agree on this last point. No matter what happens as far as the judging goes; if Silas is happy with what we did with his Funerary Ship, then we are happy too.
This one is for you Silas, your talent and your generosity of spirit!! It is our hope that we have honored you, with our entry..
Dark days, sad days
Chopin on a piano playing;
grey skies, about to rain
feels like night at 10 am.
A droplet hits the window pane.
How depressing!
Don’t turn on the little table light,
the bedside lamps…
Now this room’s a Scottish castle
bleak and damp; a dungeon door has closed,
a burst of light then thunder rumbles…
Inside you’re desolate, trapped and cold.
Dark days, cozy days
Chopin on a piano, playing,
grey skies, about to rain
feels like night at 10 am.
A droplet hits the window pane.
How perfect!
Turn on the little table light,
the bedside lamps…
Now this room’s a Scottish castle
with Rembrandt glow, spiced tea and pie
a burst of light then thunder rumbles
Inside, you’re safe and snug and dry.
Somehow, while the world was turning
I got left on the outside..standing still.
Everything seemed normal and yet
I sensed that I was missing.
Things flashed by me, while saxophones wailed like sirens
and yet, I was frozen, in place, in time, in space
The black night kept me hanging, while the colors
swirled around me, the laughter, the warmth,
but I was unable to take part…
being on another plane looking in,
seeing without living,
breathing without being alive.
Digital Rabbit Hole 