2007 Year of the Avatar?
James Cameron’s $195M green light for his new movie Avatar on January 8th by 20th Century Fox and his subsequent interview with Jeff Jensen prompted a number of earlier conversations to be revisited. Binary Bonsai first carried news of a 200 page movie script proporting to be for Avatar back in January 2006. Eric Savitz followed up on Woz remarks made at AlwaysOn Stanford Summit in July 2006 to reveal that the Apple legend was planning an expedition to the South Pole with Buzz Aldrin in hydrogen powered Hummers late 2007 with 3D footage being recorded for a James Cameron project. All of a sudden there was renewed interest in all things Avatar related.
Since then I’ve finally gotten the opportunity to sit down and watch Robo Studios recently released Second Life : A Documentary. Lots of great themes are explored from self mastery to reinvention. It is highly recommended viewing and a great intro to SL. A 378MB mp4 file is available for download over on Robo Studios web site for $5. Should you wish to learn more about the project before downloading it checkout Pheonix Psaltery’s review over in this weeks Metaverse Messenger. With Tim Guest’s book Second Lives release in May there will be more accessible material available in the public domain to help people begin to better understand Virtual Worlds.
Today at the Second Thurday session at Alt-Zoom Studios the talented moo Money defined machinima as animation shot in real time in a 3D environment. She went on to describe how the term machinima was originally derived from the words machine + cinema. However a character called Hugh Hancock mis-spelled machinema as machinima in an email and the new term was preferred. Many will be surprised to learn that its origins date back to the game Quake some 10 years ago.
Afterwards I noticed that Mark Wallace pointed out Keith Stuarts Guardian Gameblog post on The Sims Short machinima competition. So all in all lots of great conversations on avatars and machinima since the start of the year. Each of which have both directly and indirectly promoted the visibility and interest in Virtual Worlds. People are beginning to tune into The Third Wave of the Internet which we have been referring to as The Living Web. Enough to make me realise that 2007 is already shaping up to potentially be the year of the Avatar. Interesting times indeed.