This Machinima was inspired by The EVENT.

The EVENT is a breakthrough training, that lasts  3 days. It deals with themes of communication, responsibility, The Shadow( Jungian ), and relationships.

Machinima and Music…by Joe Cavanagh.

Filmed in Second Life on the island of Macbeth, created by Angela Thomas, Kate Richards and Kerreen Ely-Harper

Flatirons Winter Sunrise

While I have been staying in Boulder, Colorado these last 6 months, I started writing some Clarinet and Piano music that described my response to parts of the Boulder Landscape.

Now finished and soon to be published by BRS music, here they are.

Flatirons.mp3
Wonderland__Lake.mp3
Pearl_Street.mp3

Photo by Jesse Varner, Jan. 6, 2005.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

This was my 2nd attempt at Machinima, the soundtrack this time, being the slow movement of my Flute Sonata. My flute sonata is a piece in Brasillian Jazz style, and represents my attempt to accurately notate what Jazz musicians actually play when they improvise. This is much harder than it sounds, as there are many subtleties of rhythm, which feel very natural to play, but , which look fiendishly unplayable when rendered into normal western notation.

The idea here was simply to show a love story between a couple of musicians….its rise and fall. Initially my idea was to film something in all 4 seasons, but I realised that the piece wasnt long enough to cram in that many ideas, so I ended up with a winter and a summer setting.

Making this piece brought me face to face with one of the great limitations of machinima…..the lack of expression in Avatars faces.  I searched the whole of Second Life in vain,  for ways to animate the facial features of the Avatars. Slowly realising , that this must be the reason so many machinima pieces, are more concerned with action, rather than emotion.

This was my first Machinima. I had completed the audio track sometime before.  It was a version of the famous piece by Saint-Saens using virtual Instruments. In this case I used the Gofriller Cello by Garritan Libraries which I had beta-tested. The harp part comes from the Garritan Personal Orchestra.

I had no particular narrative in mind for this machinima, just to collect some beautiful images that would go with the music.

I was shocked when I played this to a friend, who found it perplexing.  Why are there 2 Black swans in it ?  What does that mean ?  Does this relate to the Black Cello Player ?? What story is this trying to tell ??? etc, etc. The answer to all of these questions was….I dunno.

But it made me more aware that people expect SOME kind of narrative flow to a machinima. Even one, who’s main purpose is to showcase the soundtrack.