Avatar movie is ahead of the curve, and you usually are, too, Vanity Fair

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

This is a gentle rant brought on by Vanity Fair magazine's twitter: "@VanityFairmag Don't Be Fooled by Avatar's Lame Trailer http://is.gd/2s7YX #Avatar" a couple of hours ago. For like forever, I've been known to say that if I only had access to three magazines to keep up with the state-of-play, smarter, faster, better-informed intelligentsia, I'd pick Vanity Fair, Businessweek, and Utne Reader, and that selection still stands, but it's teetering. Vanity Fair, don't make the same mistake that Chris Anderson and his Wired made in 2006. I forgive you, but hurry up and realize that avatars are ahead of the curve. Like you. In fact, your readers are mostly going to embrace their avatarhood and evangelize about it within the next three years, and that "lame" Avatar trailer and movie are going to have something (if not a lot) to do with it.

~*~

It was 1997 and opening night. I recall whispering in the dark to my companion that if Kate Winslet's aged character "throws that damned necklace into the sea, I'm going to have to leave the theater." And she did. And I did. To this day, I have never seen the ending of James Cameron's Titanic, the all-time highest grossing film at the box office. So yes, I have questioned and even suffered visceral adverse reactions to Cameron's work.

Yesterday, I watched the teaser trailer for Avatar, slated to hit theaters this December. I've spent the better part of the last two years traipsing around virtual worlds as an avatar, so I'll confess that the poor trailer was in trouble even before I hit the "play" button. My overlayed cynical filter was as thick as the bottom of a glass Coke bottle and I fully expected to loathe it.



But I didn't hate it. Turns out that I can hardly wait to see it, and it made me want to learn more about the plot, the script and how and where it was produced. It looks as real as the island of Kauai does, which stands to reason because that's where most of it was shot.

I don't play games in virtual worlds. As Metanomics puts it, I'm all over the serious aspects of three-dimensional persistent, immersive, massively multi-player online "games," such as art, architecture, business and education. I've put up with an awful lot to be an early-adopter avatar, including lag so bad that my "character" couldn't move, umpteen flying penises and banana phones (annoying griefing devices employed by sophomoric idiots), communications so shoddy that my text chat never made it to the person or people I was trying to speak with, and hundreds upon hundreds of *crashes,* to mention only a few of the ways that I have been inconvenienced.

Things are picking up for avatars though and at a high rate of speed. Stability, scalability, tools for user-created content, communication, and collaboration are all vastly improving. The number of choices an avatar has on how to spend a quality hour consistently overwhelms me in much the same way selecting an art film to screen in Manhattan does. And just this week, industry analysts at Piper Jaffray released their forecasts for virtual goods, indicating that 2009 US revenues are expected to hit $621 million (134% over 2008), and $2.5 billion in 2013. Global revenues from virtual goods should exceed $2.2 billion this year, and climb to $6 billion by 2013. I'm old enough to remember when total online (2.0 web-based) revenues were lower than that, and how so many detractors doubted they'd rise significantly for decades. Heh.

Just two days ago I finally got around to downloading the client for the new virtual world Blue Mars that's in private Beta until... sometime real soon now (maybe in a couple of weeks?), and I can only say that I was overcome and dazzled by the life-like graphics, the rolling ocean foam, the exuberant vegetation and shadows that behaved the way real shadows do. In fact, it looked a lot like the trailer for Avatar.


Virtual Space Entertainment is just one of the developers rushing to create content on Blue Mars' gorgeous CryEngine2 platform

So wait, Vanity Fair. Please tell us why the Avatar trailer is lame?

Obsessed with Kubrick - In virtual worlds, your passions can materialize

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

UPDATE! The Kubrick Rooms have a new home. Teleport directly from here.

With a name like Rumpledink Robiani and a somewhat scruffy but nevertheless Hellenistic avatar to match (high forehead, tousled hair and piercing eyes), I already expected more than the regular fare from the character whose Second Life® installation I had just visited thanks to a tip from Impossible IRL'er Esther Shim. What I did know is that the person behind Rumpledink is obsessed with film, and in particular, the cinema of one director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor: Stanley Kubrick.


Rumpledink’s avatar, immortalized and illustrated by in and off-world artist four Yip

Now, I know a thing or two about film having been nearly as preoccupied with it as I am now with virtual worlds, but Rumpledink’s ardor easily exceeds mine. This born and bred Brit really knows his stuff and he’s made it possible for you to learn more about his idol with his meticulous creation and tribute to Kubrick’s films, the Kubrick Rooms (teleport directly from here).



I'm sure I didn't catch all the tributes and hints of your Kubrick Rooms. The orange bathroom… it is at the hotel (The Shining)? I'm not real good with horror.

Rumpledink: Yes, I'm the same. I'm not a big horror fan, but love Kubrick. Great scene. It is when he goes back in time and meets the caretaker, Delbert Grady. Grady spills a drink on Nicholson and takes him into the bathroom to clean up. He tells him "No, you are the caretaker here. You always have been."



Have you seen "The Killing" - an early black and white Kubrick flic? (I thought surely I’d stumped him)

Rumpledink: Yes, and will be showing it at my little Redrum cinema soon :) I’ve got a load of his early shorts, too.
...

Indeed! It also seems that Rumpledink is not the only Kubrick fan on the grid. He and Violet Morellet were chatting one day and discovered that both of them were constructing a tribute to "A Clockwork Orange’s" more than zany Korova Milk Bar, where the milk served there is laced with drugs.


Violet and Rumpledink have thoughtfully provided animations on site so that you may become a coffee table. While researching for this post, I learned that there is a real Korova Milk Bar in White Plains, NY – This shot by Rumpledink

Rumpledink: She was going to stop making hers. I said, “No, finish and add with all my other rooms.”

What were the odds that you would both be doing it… and meet?

Rumpledink: I know… right! And the freaky thing was they (the rooms) were the same… the way we were building it.


Say hi to HAL and the Eva pod in the 2001 A Space Odyssey room

The centerpiece of the installation is the War Room from Kubrick’s 1964 insanely strange comedy "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," featuring Peter Sellers in three distinctly different roles.





I learned a few days ago that Rumpledink is going to lose the land the Kubrick Rooms sit on, so if you have 1,000 prims to spare and love Kubrick, here’s your chance to rescue one of the better virtual tributes we’ve come across.

Gary Hazlitt asks, are games overtaking films?

I'd like to call your attention to Gary Hazlitt's brilliant post and video analysis/compilation featuring films and games that asks if story-rich games are becoming more culturally relevant than films. Gary is becoming my go-to-guy when it comes to virtual world overviews.

On this occasion, it seems he was preparing some curriculum for Cinematic Games and Virtual Worlds courses at AFTRS, Australia's premier film school and, as he put it, "I was staggered to see the number of major feature films in production based on new and existing game universes - suggesting to me a tipping point."

Gary (aka Gary Hayes) is a Sydney-based Brit, the director of the Australian Laboratory for Advanced Media Production (LAMP), the head of Virtual Worlds for the UK-based The Project Factory, as well as a musician, composer, videographer, builder, and blogger.

Zonja gives water a work-out for her videos, and she teaches us how

A few days ago, my good friend Sennaspirit Coronet expressed amazement when he learned that I was not familiar with Zonja Capalini's sparkling Flickr stream. While her super spirited and effervescent videos may be Possible IRL (PIRL), she is ultra generous with her tips on how to accomplish all the effects, as can be seen here and here (dynamic water preset) and here.


Music: Torley: Too Many Cliches

The combination of inexpensive video capturing apps, such as FRAPS, and the new super-gliding 3D mouse - Spacenavigator - have made film making accessible even to me, so now I'm all caught up in learning more.

I'm using Windows Movie Maker to edit, but really need to step that up (I can't even edit audio with that!). I see that Zonja is using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum, but am still investigating which apps give the biggest bang for the buck and are easiest to use.

Live-action manga-style Machinima begs the question: What else are we missing???

There's a noisy revolution going on over at the :sick: sims (teleport directly from here) and I've been stone deaf to it. That is, until today when Machinimator Masami Kuramoto introduced me to a whole scene... I mean this is just the tip of a gigantic iceberg that's been sitting over there; more like roaring over there... my gawd, here's a video that was added to youtube in June, 2007... and there are 13 others! After watching like the fourth vid, I shook my head and asked myself, "how did I miss it all?"

Take this manga inspired live-action superhero flick. It's loaded with tokusatsu and monsters, and it even has subtitles, for crying out loud. I googled it to see if anyone else in our English language world had uncovered this gem... and only one person had, that I could tell. Yep. That would be Torley Linden. We gotta listen to Torley more.

The intro credits feature a lot of English jibberish... but the real film begins at 1:17 minutes.



The main person behind this and other:sick: stuff: mk curtiz. More on him real soon, and the other people who surely deserve credit but I don't know any better.

So... what else are we missing 'cause we don't speak Japanese?

Chris Marker and his presence in Second Life, via the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

Chris Marker is a much celebrated and admired French author, photographer, film director, multimedia artist and documentarist. His "La Jetée" - a masterpiece which inspired the 1995 Academy Award-nominated science fiction film "Twelve Monkeys" - and "Sans Soleil," among other seminal works, made cinematic history in voice, text and associative media practices.


This is part one of La Jetée, by Chris Marker (1963). Both La Jetée and Sans Soleil have been re-released via restored high-definition digital transfers and are available through the Criterion Collection

Born in 1921, Chris is one of the most profiled figures in media history, and yet, he does not grant interviews or allow himself to be photographed. In fact, when he is asked for a photograph, he provides an image of a cat, instead. This legendary denial would suggest that he was destined to become an avatar. Indeed... this Tuesday, that is exactly what will happen.



On Tuesday, March 11th, at 11am SLT / 19:00 CET, and in conjunction with a Real Life exhibtion in Zurich, Switzerland at the Museum für Gestaltung, Chris will be present at an "ouvroir" that was commissioned by the museum, and created by MosMax Hax (teleport directly from here). Chris will play with his own work, in the company of his longtime guide, Monsieur Guillame, a cat and a furry entity in Second Life.


Monsieur Guillame

If you do not know Chris Marker's works, I heartily recommend that you conduct a bit of research and learn more about this man's artistic legacy. You might then agree that this is an event of great import, and understand, too, the presence of the whale on the sim, as well as numerous other objects.

In addition to his films, the exhibit also showcases several of Chris' powerful portraits of Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa, Salvador Dalí and Fidel Castro... further evidence of his obsession for staring back at his subejcts.

Curators: Chris Marker, Margarete Jahrmann, Max Moswitzer

In Real Life:
Chris Marker. A Farewell to Movies
March 12, 2008 - June 29,2008
at the at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich