KerryJ's Neotenous Tech

Recording events is quite different from creating machinima to my mind.  Although both can occur in a game or virtual world, the aims are quite different. I love the surrealism of virtual worlds and try to bring that “Alice in Wonderland” sense out when I create a machinima.  So I keep the videos brief, use dance music that adds an unusual air and go for sweeping shots and dramatic takes. But in recording conversations and events, realism has to dominate in order not to distract from the information. So today I experimented by recording a conversation that took place after Jo Kay and a group of us went exploring some educational resource sims in Second Life. As I only had the one camera, getting cut away shots was difficult, so I’ll apologise in advance for the camera work.  Also, I found after the shoot that Fraps by default records on-screen cursors.  Oh well. What I did try to do is to highlight the text conversation that inevitably takes place.  Sometimes this happens because people don’t want to interrupt the main speaker — sometimes because they know there is background noise where they are. I highlighted the text conversation by duplicating the video track, zooming in on the text portion and then doing a picture in picture/cutaway effect in Sony Vegas video.  I also set the overlay track of the highlighted text at 80% opacity. If you’re interested in what’s happening on jokaydia, by all means watch all of this.  If you’re interested just in the technique I attempted to highlight the text, just watch the first few minutes.  And please, let me know what you might have done differently — keeping in mind that my goal was the shortest possible turn-around time. If you’re on RSS — the link to the video is: http://blip.tv/file/1905389 If you’re on my blog, here it is embedded:

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