What a month!

Sorry I haven't posted in nearly a month...the day-to-day running of the classroom has kept me far busier than I really have time for. To bring things up-to-date....

First off...Thespis is in SL at school! Yay! The techs managed to do their magic and get me access to the Teen Grid right from my laptop at school. This means I've been able to project the image for the class and show them some of the stuff they'll be able to do once they are all in world (I'm assured the techs are working on the program that's needed to create the student accounts. My biggest hope is that, once they've gone through all this for my class this year...things will be in place for future years and future classes. If we want entire Spanish classes coming inworld, the teacher can't wait 3 months for the accounts to be created!).

The kids got excited all over again when I showed them what could be done. While I don't like the fly animation I bought with the animation HUD I have (the kids make fun of it and I let them. It'll wear off eventually), everything else works well. We did find a leftover motorcycle and reported it to the sim owner. They actually enjoyed finding that and got quite excited about riding it. But permissions were set that only the owner of the bike could actually control it :( .

I also took a day and showed them what could happen with building and with textures. Really a very brief overview. I'm not expecting anyone to remember how to actually do it. But the theory is that I'll show them the once...then, since we're not in-world, we'll make some of our own textures and, once they ARE in, they'll learn how to upload the textures and begin playing around with the prims.

So, to that end, today we used the Paint program and created textures. It was fun to watch them play around and draw stuff they've obviously been drawing in Paint for a while. Everyone was familiar with the program (a pleasant surprise to me), so I turned them loose while I left the projector on and created a piece of my own. I then downloaded Picasa to my computer (I'm still using a temporary one, but that's a whole different story for a whole different blog). When I bemoaned the fact that they didn't have Picasa on theirs...several of the kids checked and said they did! Turns out it's on ALL the laptops, but not the big machines along the side of my room. So those on laptops were able to then tweak their drawings using Picasa's tools. I ended up with a very nice zebra skin, if I do say so myself (and I wasn't even trying!).

Next step will be to upload all the textures to the wiki, not only to brag a little about each one, but to share them with each other and have a place that they can go to grab what they need. I love Torley Linden's site for textures...but he hosts them on Flickr and the school blocks that site. So...we work around it and create our own :) !

Enjoy!
Thespis

Machinima workflow

If you read my last post, you know I'm working on creating my first machinima. I decided to document my workflow for future use (as I'm sure there are things I'll forget when I go to teach this to the kids). So....

Day one:
1) Get assignment from the PBWiki summer course and decide to create machinima. Estimated time for assignment according to the instructor: 1.5 hours.
2) Go to Torley Linden's site to determine how it's done.
3) Read his workflow
4) download Camtasia and watch several "how to" videos from their site
5) open SLTG and record first Camtasia video (it's terrible!)
6) discover my original idea of doing a flyby of the entire set of sims just isn't do-able on my computer (need new graphics card and faster processor). Recorded video is jerky when SL graphics are turned up full.

Day two:
7) Turn down graphics in SL
8) now buildings appear and disappear when I try to film them as I move closer and further away from them. Video still looks terrible.

Day three:

9) Decide to do a set of small shots showing just AccelerateNation4 (the sim which will be the home base for my class come September). By scaling down the project and going with several shorter recordings, I'm hoping to get rid of the jerky camera movements.
10) Prepare SL; start Camtasia
11) make 2 recordings
12) edit first recording by adding titles (had to watch another vidtut to figure them out)
13) add transitions once all the titles are in (some work, some don't. Have NO idea why)
14) burn the music I want to use to my hardrive to make it easier to find and upload into the program
15) ask permission from Heath to USE the music (I know, I did it backwards).
16) discover if you edit after adding music, you also edit out the music clip.
17) add in second recording; edit
18) add end titles and second piece of music
19) discover you can move the music away from the titles so you can edit titles, then put music back (still want a way to play the music and edit the video separately so I can time the beats better)
20) save and publish to web!

Actual time spent: 7 hrs. (sigh). And that doesn't include the extra time I needed when the video didn't upload to YouTube because I had the wrong extension (thank you, Frank! And don't laugh at my jerky camera!).