East Beach

Submitted by Kanjena Sweetleaf

I came to Second Life (SL) to make movies. I was invited by an artist friend, M4SK22 Melody to come in to Second Life and help him with some Machinima projects he was working on. I arrived at 'Noobland' or whatever it's called and blundered around for a while until I received a message from my friend with a teleport ride to the sim where he was filming. The sim was Chi. This is where I discovered SL surfing. Riding the virtual waves (badly) was literally the third thing I did here, the first was blundering around noobland as mentioned above, and the second was getting dressed as an owl and making an art movie, but that's another story.

A few months ago I was chatting to my friend and we talked about making a new movie.  He had some music which he'd made in his composer/producer alter-ego known as 'The Records We Never Made'  that he thought would be good for a Machinima video, and I suggested that we make a surfing movie as we hadn't ever done that before. 

So we decided how to do it. I would film scenes of myself surfing, and he would film some scenes of me surfing.  Then we'd mix it all together and see what happens. We talked about 'real' surfing, too, and our experiences in the North Coast of Scotland and particularly the amazing swell of East Beach in Thurso, a town on the North Atlantic coast of Scotland, whose name means 'Thor's River' in the ancient Norse language Norn.

We chose Austin Novaland's Playa Perdida as the location for our SL shoot and that footage was mixed with some scenes from North Scotland that my friend had collected. We call this form 'Hybrid Machinima' a cinematic mashup of real world and virtual world.

Here it is, the finished product, as the ghostly North Coast meets the hallucinatory Virtual coast. 

 

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