Reel Expression

First off, I’m biased in the fact that I don’t like corporations. In RL or SL. It’s not because I’m some dirty hippie scared of capitalisim, it has to do with individuality and personal responsibility. Both of those huge parts of humanity seem to get lost when it comes to corporate america.

• The big 10 media companies decide the content in all your music, radio, tv, films, books, and newspapers.
• Enron’s involvement in California’s electricity crisis.
• Wal-Mart as low-wage no benifits employers - average employee makes less than $19,000 a year. They used to lobby against raising the minuim wage until they publically flipped. But still 42 out of the 49 people who voted against the last bill recieved contributions from Wal-Mart.
• Clothing companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, The Gap, Inc. (Banana Republic, Old Navy), J. Crew Group, The Limited, Liz Claiborne, Nordstrom, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sears, Tommy Hilfiger use(d) sweatshops in Saipan and still able to have the “made in the USA tag.”
• Blockbuster (viacom) has the pull and power to demand from the studios “legal” tamed down versions of films.

I don’t think its the fault of capitalisim itself, the problem stems from these untouchable corps having no one to answer to. It starts out as simple greed then stems into doing whatever possible to keep profits high and costs low. The greed itself isn’t what’s wrong as it’s a natural human instict. The issue really is that there are hardly any checks and balances for the evil things they do. One definate thing that needs to change is the role they play in american politics.

So of course the idea of corporations within SL is slightly worring. Luckily for now the impact is rather low and mostly used for marketing.

Imminent Walmartization of SL?
I’ve had a number of conversations with Alle on this one. Oddly, she’s a lot more worried then I am about this possibility. Would a clothing company be able to easily make a dent into the SL fashion industy? Sure why not? They have the money to throw at marketing, professional graphic designers, and builders. But would that dent be so big that everyone else just stops? I doubt it. Look at the history of the SL industry. When I started Pixel Dolls was the top store. Did that stop everyone else from trying? Nope. Many others have grown up since then and some have become quite large. But for every designer that does obtain sucess, it doesn’t mean that the older ones will go out of business.

The fact of the matter is is that it costs very little to create and sell things within SL. So, I think (and hope) that there will always be people dinking around making stuff and then setting it up for sale hoping that other people will like it too.

Another point of that is those big companies would have the marketing power, but isn’t SL like that anyways? With the help of blogs, smaller names are becoming larger names (myself included) where once it was only in who you know. While it may be a touch easier now then it was just last year, it still revolves a lot on who the bloggers know and like. Yes, it does suck, but that’s just how it goes. How will that change? It could really go either way. The larger blogs could report on both corp and individuals or not. But I like to think of it in the ways of indie music. There will always be an idie music scene - people making it, people buying it, and people reporting it. I think that no matter what happens, the same will hold true in SL.

Market Research
One thing that does worry me about something like this is what happens when you add market research to the current designers. Back in Jan, Second Style posted a story about a market research firm selling a survey of 105 residents’ opinion on women’s fashion. Now you’d think everyone would laugh it off as being 1. paid and 2. only 105 people. But one thing it revealed was a lack of business suits (untrue) - a month later most of the new released items were business related.

I hate market research. Why? Because I hate averages. I don’t like “normal.” They try to find normal in a world that is anything but. I really hate when people try to sell something that is the average opinion of a group of “normal” people. The individual opinion is therefore lost.

I like individuality. I like creativity. I like creative expression.

During film school I partisipated in a number of film market tests. You get to see an unfinished film for free and they give you a piece of paper with questions. Things like: which parts made you laugh, which didn’t make any sense, what did you like best, ect. I’d then see the finished movie and not a single one was better after the reedit. Not one.

I really do believe that something is lost when anything you create is catored to the masses instead of being an organic creative object.

Appologies for not being around much, if at all in the past 3 weeks or so. My real life has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride.

The limited time I have been able to work, has been spent doing things mostly out of SL. I have been working on my website (coming soon) - bought the domain, set up the hosting, relearning dreamweaver, graphics work, setting up the new blog, modding blog template, and figuring out how to move all these posts over.

After a lot of research, I decided to switch from blogger to wordpress. The decision is partly due to hosting capabilities and the more things you can do with wordpress. Having your blog with blogger but hosting it on your own domain isn’t entirely a walk in the park. With wordpress its bloody easy. Although it did take awhile of searching to get a plugin to transfer all the posts and comments without having to manually copy and paste.

Another thing I have been working on is a commercial for my store that will most likely just be on the website. I’ve always wanted to dabble in machinima but until a few days ago I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. I’m an editor. Not a writer, director, or cinematographer. Actually, in film school I was pretty good at cinematography but I always hated being on the set. I think that has a lot to do with my photography background.

I was laying on the couch bored out of my mind watching tv when the idea just popped into my head. It was a simple shot that grasped what I do in SL with my pose work. That part is the middle so from there I figured out how to get there in technical terms of editing and what should happen next. I then bounced over to my computer to email alle the treatment.

I spent the following couple of days writing the script, drawing the storyboards (badly), and figuring out the technical aspects of filming in SL. That was actually a lot easier then I thought it was going to be. I knew it had to be 720×576 screen resolution but SL didn’t seem to have that option in the graphic prefrences. SL being odd as it is, in the file menu there is a setting to change the window size to pal. I have heard a lot of people talk about the difficulties of bringing fraps captured stuff into Avid, so I downloaded it and a number of different programs to do some screen tests.

What I found out is that the fraps avi is encoded with a codec that avid doesn’t recognize. So, I sent the screen test through virtualdub and saved it as an uncompressed avi. Basically just removing the codec. Sounds logical enough to me. Others have stated to compress it further into mpeg, but I’m of the group of people that you should always start with the highest quailty of video and then compress for the web later.

On the SL forums, hypercam seems to be the most announced program other then fraps (for windows) probably because it saves as an uncompressed avi to begin with. As I was saying, I did screen test with each and comes to find out the fraps version is of much higher quality. Actually the hypercam one was worse then any of the final compressions I’ve ever done. It was the first one I brought into avid and looking at it almost made me scrap the entire project. When I opened the fraps test in virtual dub, it didn’t look all that much better. But after stripping the codec and bringing in to avid, its far more clear and less texture bleed.

*edit* I did some more playing around and was able to get hypercam to bring me an uncompressed AVI. The only issue with it is that its 32bit with an alpha channel. This imports into Avid really oddly so I had to pass it through virtualdub to drop it to 24bit. In the end, that made the more clean version so I guess that’s the program I’m going with.

Now all I have to do is build the sets, make a couple of animations, shoot and edit. Hah.

Real Life
Remeber how I said it’s been a rollercoaster ride? It’s not like its anything dramatic at all, just a series of not so fun events right after the other.

First up.. Hunter got an eye infection. Not a bad one, but got her some antibiotics just to be sure. The problem was that you had to give them to her 2x per day. Out of the two of them she’s the far more cuddly one, but she squims pretty fast and well if you are trying to hold her there. Chuck is the more independant one. If he wants cuddles he’ll come over to me, stand on his hind legs, and bump his head into my right arm until I stop what I’m doing. He’ll then lay down right there and wait for some fuss. After a few strokes, he’ll stand up and move into the hallway, a few more strokes, then he’ll move into the lounge. If I don’t follow him, he’ll just come back and try it all again. But damn if he sits there patiently while I trim his claws or brush him. Hunter on the other hand will take fuss anywhere and everywhere in the house, but I can’t count the amount of scratches I’ve gotton from trimming claws and that bloody eye ointment.

Ok.. so why did that keep me away? Well, I have insomnia and my husband works at different times each day. Most of the week was finally falling asleep at 4am and having to wake up at 6 to give her the drops. What’s even more sad about it, is that once I’m awake I stay that way. You’d think that I’d be able to fall asleep early the next night, but my insomnia has nothing to do with being tired it’s that my mind just will not stop.

Then I got what I thought was allergies, then thought it was the flu, which turned out to be a severe case of hay fever. I woke up last tue with congestion, itchy eyes, ect. So I took a benadryl thinking that all would be fine later. But later brought on a pretty nasty fever and full body aches. Those things didn’t come with allergies, I thought to myself, it must be the flu!

I really hate being ill. Not just because of the pain, but because I can’t do anything at all. I used to get my colds in my nose, so the following is from personal experiences… getting your colds in your ears is the worst thing that can ever happen. Pray to something that it never happens to you. I have no idea how it happened, but thanksgiving 2001 I got an ear infection in both ears and ever since that’s where it all goes.

So for all the years that I have stuffy nose colds I only remember one time where it was painful to sit up. And that was from extreme circumstances of having a nasty bout of mono that swelled my tonsils so much they were touching, along with the flu, seasonal allergies, and something else that I picked up as a side effect from the drugs to reduce the tonsil swelling. Thrush I believe it was. That was a month of liquid codine (prescribed…yes it was that bad) and unable to move.

With cold in your ears every single time I get just a little bit stuffy, the act of just sitting up gives extreme pain and pressure. So, I spent a very boring week on the couch watching crap Brit tv. Wonderful shows like “sex in court” - during primetime and not cable - think of jude judy where judy looks like a fugly drag queen and all the cases are like “she wont let me go down on her” with expert witnesses showing diagrams and a detailed explination of why she should let him. Which the jury has to decide if she is order to let him. Then there was the wonderful world of “Australian Princess” where girls learn how to be rich snobs to win a Prince. Did I ever mention I hate “reality” tv? Cheap fucks not wanting to pay for skilled artists.

So finally a few days ago either my head stopped pounding or my extreme boredom took over and I did the work on the commercial. I wasn’t really feeling much better but I had to stop watching that crap.

Then it went bad…
I now have seasonal allergic conjunctivitis. Which is just like pinkeye but not contagious and antibiotics won’t help. I just have to wait it out. Swollen eyeballs and eyelids, itching and slight burning. Until last week I didn’t even know your actual eyeball can get as swollen as they felt.

Only twice before I’ve had allergies effect my eyes this bad. When I was very little, I didn’t understand what being allergic to pollen was. So, one bright summer day I took some red powder stuff off some flowers in the yard and painted my face in “war paint.” Needless to say my eyes swelled shut. The only other time was when I was 14. I had saved all my money from babysitting and chores and things to buy contacts. The day after I got them, my right eye wouldn’t open and I have been too freaked out since to find a contact solution that I wasn’t allergic to.

** a few days later**
I’ve had to write this over a number of days because I can’t look at the monitor for too long. Most of the time I lay on the couch with a cold washcloth over my eyes. Now the swelling has gone down and the itching has reduced. My congestion is pretty much gone - yay!! - but I still have a lingering cough. I’m hoping I’ll be able to work at least enough to finish a pose pack by the end of the week. *fingers crossed*

-Luth