My Top 3 Pier Screening Machinima Entries

For today’s Pier Screening finalists we chose a single machinima selection, Robbie Dingo’s Watch the World(s), a beautiful tribute to the process of artistic creation. (I wrote on my Second Life blog about how Robbie created it.) We actually received several other strong machinima entries that, while they didn’t fit the Screening format for various reasons, are also worth a watch. Here are my three favorites:

The Labyrinth (O Labirinto) by Hugo Almeida is a gorgeous and dreamlike music video about lost love. It includes smooth and sumptuous camera work movingly merged to a Radiohead-esque single, performed by Portuguese musician Rui Gaio.

Noobility by Bettina Tizzy is an eerie montage of falling bodies and stone pyramids; you can just enjoy it as a surreal tableau, but it has an interesting back story as well. It’s actually an interactive art installation in Second Life designed to trigger copies of “noobs” (i.e. new avatars) to drop on the pyramids. (Disclosure: the Noobility installation happens to be hosted by a sponsor of my SL blog.)

SynaesthAsia by Osprey Therian is a vividly captured live concert video in Second Life (so the avatars not only dance, but fly amid dazzling particle effects.) The two musicians in the video are based in Taiwan and Japan, respectively. They separately stream the audio from their instruments into their computers, then into the shared SL performance space.

Image credit: Osprey Therian.