Second Life Analysis

We're finished with the initial game engine explorations, so here are my findings on Second Life, which we've thankfully decided to abandon.

Second Life is a popular game engine to use for machinima, and this is encouraged by the Second life creators, Linden Labs.
However, second life is not very easy to use for machinima purposes. A lot of the problems reflect the problems of a real world film project. You must find an in world location, as building one yourself is out of the question unless you want to pay for land. You then have to buy or find props. Building within Second life is possible, but the controls are horrible and my existing modelling skills become useless. It is possible to import textures into second life (which you have to pay to do) but not existing models. This seems like a huge waste of potential. Searching for props is not easy to do and was very time consuming. I had to spend time earning Linden dollars before I could even get started.
The other problem is that you need actors. As Second Life is an MMO of sorts, you require one person to puppet every avatar in the scene. Controlling an avatar and a camera at once is very tricky, so ideally the director would want to be apart from the scene. This means you’d need a person for every actor on screen at once, plus a director, making this a very inefficient option in terms of manpower.
The lack of scripting in Second Life means that for every take you do, the whole sequence must be acted again. This can be a disadvantage if you had everything going just right and just wanted to alter a camera angle- something that wouldn’t be a problem in an engine such as source.
Second Life also doesn’t look that great as a filming location. The residents have horrible modelling habits due to the weird builder, the textures all tile noticeably, and it’s rare to find a build with an overall art style behind it.
The main use of machinima within Second Life seems to be filming personally important events, such as in-game weddings, rather than any particularly creative endeavours. The only people I can see really wanting to pursue machinima within Second Life are the residents themselves.

I'll have to find out if I'm allowed to post up the video of the work I did as it's the BBC's intellectual property.