Robo Studios announces premiere of documentary
Robo Studios yesterday announced the premiere of Second Life: a Documentary, which takes place on Nemesis and NCC sims on January 30. As places are limited to 30 on each sim, Robo Studios boss Anders von Reis Crooks, or Anders Ogre to SL residents, decided that after inviting the people who were involved in making the film, the tickets for the premiere would be raffled in aid of some good causes.
Two good causes have been chosen, the Red Cross in RL and Support for Healing island in SL. If you would like to enter the raffle, and support a good cause, go to the vendor outside the Robo Studios office in Nemesis at Nemesis 112, 222, 22 and buy a chair, which gives you a chance to win a ticket, and a copy of the Robo Studios chair with Craig Altman animation.
After the premiere on the 30th, the film will be available to download at the Robo Studios website. More details will be published as those become available, but the plan is to allow people to buy their download direct from the website, or through an object in world, in linden dollars. To coincide with the announcement of the Premiere, and having seen a rough cut of the film, I tracked down Anders to the Nemesis Robo Studios cinema and asked him a few questions. I need to declare an interest in the film and in the people making it. Anders has been living on Nemesis for some months, during the course of the making of Second Life: A Documentary and thus not only did I take part in the film interviews (I’m the one that sounds like the Queen according to my children), I have also come to think of Anders as a friend.
I had an ulterior motive for wanting to take part in the film: I was hoping that if people saw Numbakulla on the film, they would want to go and see it. But I also wanted to help Anders make his documentary because I am a passionate advocate for Second Life. I asked Anders what made him want to make a film about Second Life, and he answered with his usual disarming honesty:
“We initially were just looking for something we could do cheaply. Most of the company was just out of college, and our financial assets remain somewhat limited. We really discovered SL by accident through I believe Fortune magazine.
“We didn’t even know what Second Life was really. We came into it wanting to make a film just about the economy, but so many questions were raised that I think the film ends up being more about what Second Life is.”
Having seen a rough cut of the film,I agree with that. It isn’t the critical appraisal of Linden Lab and Second Life that some people would like to see, but is a much warmer, more personal view of what Second Life is to a group of residents of varying age and experience. Prokofy Neva criticised it (film unseen) for not soliciting more critical views and said: “When I expressed disappointment in the FIC appearances, Anders didn’t get it…. Hehe he must not have looked very hard, and not talked to the legions of people with criticism of SL for all reasons.” Prokofy continues: “What happened — as always happens — is that the little FICoids found out some potential high–profile project was in the works and inserted themselves into it…”.
Well this is Prokofy’s spin on it. In actual fact, Anders advertised for people, to interview, on the forum and elsewhere, and invited anyone who was interested to take part in the film. I asked if anyone got rejected?
“No, we interviewed everyone we could get our hands on, which admittedly was probably everyone paying attention to the forums and who would be looking to be interviewed,” said Anders. “One thing I will freely admit is that we have very limited resources as a company, so we were not able to expend large amounts of time chasing down viewpoints that were not readily available to us.”
I think that Anders was very open to anyone who wanted to talk, and it was more representative to allow those who had an opinion to offer it. Actively hunting down people to be critical seems no more balanced than trying to ensure everyone is positive… it’s just spin.
Anders continued: “I did try and actively take everyone that we could find, I think that my inexperience within SL at the time may have hampered my ability to get it out to a larger audience, but I also agree that I would never actively seek a certain point of view either, as it would be trying to create a viewpoint rather then finding a consensus.
“One person who did get poorly represented was Lewis Nerd,” he admitted, “because of our own technical problems learning how to use Skype. His viewpoint of SL as a game was sorely unrepresented and might be the basis for something else on SL.”
I thought the sound was amazingly good considering that the interviews were done over Skype…. The film is all from within SL, and took hours and hours of filming to bring together the hour we see in the documentary. Interviews were conducted by the free internet phone service, Skype, after releases were signed by the participants. “Well, we thought of this entirely virtual movie as an interesting experiment. Could something like this be made for free, spanning oceans, just using SL and Skype? There were definitely things we could have done to improve audio quality, or add real life images, but I think one of the points of the film, is that the film itself highlights the power of Second LIfe. Interestingly, our editor who put it together from the interviews had never even been in Second Life until the film was finished. So in his assembly he really started learning a lot about Second Life.”
I think the film shows a pretty well-rounded view of Second Life, which would make it understandable to people who have never been in, and interesting to old-timers alike. I can see that there was a learning curve for interviewing and filming, but for me the best thing about it is that the authentic voice of a range of Second Life participants comes across clearly. I just wish I hadn’t said fantastic 20 times. And told everyone repeatedly how much you learn about yourself. Still, I hope that the interwoven thread of opinion which has been created by the film editor, makes the film more than the sum of its parts, and conveys a realistic overall impression of some of the things which inspire people like me.
January 25th, 2007 • 
Caliandris Pendragon • 
comment | January 25, 2007 at 07:22 | individual comment-link
Good write-up, although I wonder where Prokovy said those things that were quoted (is there a link available or was it in a chat or something?). Not sure that I’ll be able to sit through a documentary about Second Life an hour in length, but will wait for reviews from others. If the movie isn’t too expensive, I’ll probably buy it just to contribute to the project.
comment | January 25, 2007 at 07:27 | individual comment-link
Great interview Caliandris. I look forward to seeing more.
comment | January 25, 2007 at 07:31 | individual comment-link
Ack. In adding a link to Prokofy’s Second thoughts blog, I accidentally deleted the bigging of the sentence…no idea how that happened frankly. I caught the deletion and reinserted the words that vanished, but didn’t twig that the link had gone. His words can be read here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/01/ive_been_wonder.html
Sorry about that.
As for an hour long documentary…how long are documentaries usually in the US??? An hour is short for a subject as diverse as SL. I didn’t find it difficult to watch, but then I had the additional frisson of embarrassment every time I heard my own voice. If your attention span is challenged by an hour, perhaps it will help to tell you that the documentary is in segments that will be easy to watch separately, from the comfort of your computer….
comment | January 25, 2007 at 08:17 | individual comment-link
Hi Caliandris -
I have a hard time getting through most documentaries of that length (still haven’t managed to get through Fahrenheit 9/11) unless it’s a topic I’m really, really interested in like the JFK assasination for example. Of course I’m interested in SL, but I’d rather use that time to watch the lastest episode of 24, given a choice. Watching it in pieces would probably be too distractive. Of course I reserve the right to take this all back if the documentary blows me away and sucks me in from the beginning.
As for the link, fixing that for you now, as well as sending a trackback to Prokofy’s blog so he is aware you wrote and quoted him here
For future reference, the trackback link is at the end of his posts and you can copy/paste that into the trackback section to automatically notify with links.
comment | January 25, 2007 at 08:53 | individual comment-link
Caliandris, if you get to hype a film before it’s ever seen (you got an insider’s showing?) and the rest of the blogosphere gets to hype it before it even comes out (as we’ll be seeing all over the SLogosphere today and in the coming week), I sure do get to look at the trailer, and sure do get to make critical comments. Who says you can’t make critical comments about a trailer?
I, too, was heavily involved in the film at the very beginning. To be sure, I didn’t invite the film-maker to come live on my land, but I explained a lot of SL stuff to him, including even how to work the camera angles to make filming work better, and suggested other people and venues for him to visit. I myself answered his ad, so I’m well aware that he made an open call. What happened — what inevitably happens when somebody tries to tell the story of SL with some kind of underlying motive or agenda or fame or fortune or even just relevance — is that he had to make the narrative cohere. This is common in the media business. The stories don’t always flow when you just shoot what’s there or cover what you started out to cover. Nobody will pay for that. So you have to cut and paste to a template of what the demand is. I just think it’s important to reflect on when that process begins and how it is funnelled.
So that’s how he wound up with some of this hackneyed stuff like Mysty having to play Grandma and Flipper gassing on about gas-station once again. And Anders himself explains it very starkly, in contrast to Caliandris’ spin:
““No, we interviewed everyone we could get our hands on, which admittedly was probably everyone paying attention to the forums and who would be looking to be interviewed,” said Anders. “One thing I will freely admit is that we have very limited resources as a company, so we were not able to expend large amounts of time chasing down viewpoints that were not readily available to us.”
What, no man on the street? No random Welcome Area encounter? No town hall demonstrators? Takashi and Pierce are able to do that sort of thing at the drop of a hat, very effectively.
The people on the forums made up less than five percent of the whole population; of these, probably 2 percent actually posted and argued with each other.
Everybody understands that young indie filmmakers just getting out of college are on a shoestring budget. But if we are all to be used to help advance young Anders’ career here, in the brave new world of Web 2.0, where it’s not just experts and professionals and “official filmmakers” and “approved narrators” who tell the story, we get to have input and commentary, too. Caliandris, you seem to be hewing to the old dinosaur media paradigm where an elite figure makes a movie backed by wealthy or influential personages and everybody just gets to sit and munch popcorn. Get ready for how this is all going to be changing now — make a movie in SL, you get your subjects not sitting there like the props and characters you think you’ve condescendingly staged to fit in your narrative, but watch them surprise you and climb right out of the fourth wall to comment right up front the minute they see the trailer. In fact, if it all works the way it’s supposed to, and there are enterprising people with time on their hands, Anders’ original and possibly even copyright protected work becomes part of mashups and Youtubizations and influences a generation of SL movie-makers — a generation being 30 days, perhaps, in the sped-up life of SL.
Mash-ups…Except…we see he’s already going in the direction of pay-per-view downloads. I’m actually all for that. I think all this Creative Commons Free Culture stuff is for the birds. Of course, Anders might consider giving the subjects of his film a free, non-distributable copy, the way a RL TV channel might, for their time. In fact, we all signed away our rights to our images and filming of our land in detailed contracts that Anders sent us.
I’m happy to take a look at the final product and revisit the issue and if I’m “blown away” come back and say so. The point is, the trailer followed every hackneyed SL meme there is, with every promo movie ever sponsored by Lindens with jetskis and dancing avs and awed Disney narrators. I was looking for something truly more indie.
I think it’s great that this project was all done in SL and Skype. Let’s see if you can really even work with SL and Skype in any kind of sustained way. It’s damn hard, all the machinima promoters never really tell you how hard it is, and what a time suck, and they also use lots of other technology outside of just SL and Skype.
comment | January 25, 2007 at 10:15 | individual comment-link
Gosh,well, I don’t want to hype the movie, because it would be a shame if it were oversold and didn’t live up to the expectations,but I meant what I said. I have hated the machinima adverts that make it seem like it is all stripping and jetskis and I honestly don’t think it does that. It really does show people about a diverse number of businesses, the things that people really do, and it has an authenticity just *because* it isn’t too slickly put together. It is well edited, but the film quality varies the way SL and rezzing varies. I have watched and read a wide variety of film and writing about SL, and some of it strikes me as hype and distortion, and some of it rings true to my experience. I think of this documentary as being somewhere between the done-for-love project like Numbakulla and commercial project like the sheep making the Text 100 machinima… a lot of time and effort has gone into it, and if anyone had had to pay Robo Studios for it, they’d have had to pay thousands. If Robo Studios manage to make some money to fund their future projects in SL and elsewhere from the film that will be brilliant.
As you rightly say Oclee and Nemesis Content Creation have let Anders live on Nemesis for some months, with no expectation that we would gain anything from that, and I made the cinema on the same basis. However, if we get the vendors working for in-world sales, we will get a percentage of the sales, as will people hosting the vendors. I am sure that Anders and Robo Studios will be only too glad if you’d like to host one yourself. Watch this space for updates.