Chantal Harvey and the Month of Machinima

When the Linden Endowment of the Arts (LEA) stated "The Month of Machinima (MoM) event" would begin on May 4, 2011, it opened a door to creative perspectives and the magic of machinima.

The event's objectives were to promote the infinite possibilities of writing, producing and editing this wonderful art form.

At the forefront of SL's machinima creation is Chantal Harvey. Anyone watching treet.tv has seen her active promotion and recognized her grace and artistic expression.

According to Chantal, machinima is filming in a virtual world or game. What you see on your screen, is what is filmed. The process begins with the creation of a concept, the writing of a script, finding a location or building a set.

We stand on the LEA sim in the heart of imagination, a playground, as Chantal calls it. A tall cone-shaped theater is the dominating form and numerous screens play one machinima. They are short visions made possible by Second Life and the imagination of the director.

Chantal states that the production is intense work considering the time necessary to record and edit.

“It varies, sometimes I spend six weeks filming and editing for one minute of film the other extreme is filming an SL event and putting it on youtube, without edit, in that case it can be a fast and easy production,” Chantal explained.

She said that machinima is a new genre. The term was created by Hugh Hancock and originates from the words machine and cinema.

“It was a spelling mistake that caught on, we like the word. Originally, it comes from gamers that recorded their battles and races online, because they wanted to share their high scores. People started to edit the shoots, and manipulate stories like that,” she added.

On Second Life, Month of Machinima was organized by the LEA. A group of SL residents, which are supported by Linden Lab, are devoted to the promotion of art in our virtual world. LEA committee members include: Bryn Oh, Chantal Harvey, DanCoyote Antonelli, Dekka Raymaker, Dizzy Banjo, Jayjay Zifanwe, L1Aura Loire, Rez Menoptra, Sasun Steinbeck, Werner Kurosawa and Linden rep Elise Linden.

Chantal said that the LEA site was started by M. Linden, in 2010. When he left Linden Lab, LEA was put on hold, but then Courtney Linden picked it up and motivated others to carry on the project.

“We have weekly meetings and each member of LEA has a different discipline/input. Over the past 15 months, we have become a group that divides tasks and works close together,” said Chantal.

The Month of Machinima presents the best SL productions. The event promotes and motivates others to create new machinima and to showcase their latest productions. The monthly themes are:

August – Design and Architecture
September – Seasons
October – Four elements
November – SL events
December – Endings

To make a submission, log on to; https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?
formkey=dDZ3a2FsYjJMNEM5dnU4X1VZZ1FQZ1E6MQ&ifq&ndplr=1 . Submissions can be made until the 10th of each month. A screening committee then selects the top films. Art related are preferred, but they also choose other work – each month at least 3 films that were submitted earlier in the year. Every first Wednesday of the month, at 7 pm SL time, the new films begin with a screening event and the films run in the special MoM theater throughout the month.

Interest in MoM is generated through Twitter, Facebook, the SL wiki, SL blog, Chantal’s blog and her machinima groups. A lot of it is introduced through networking.

“I’m hoping for more bloggers to write about MoM, as it is the most wonderful machinima event supported by Linden Lab ever. It celebrates the films and the film makers, giving them the credits they so rightly deserve,” she stated.

As for Chantal’s work, she started creating machinima in 2007. In real life, she’s an editor and was part of pioneering art-tv projects. For many years, she ran a TV station in the Netherlands. She’s Dutch.

She told me, “I produce, film, direct, edit, I do SFX and sound design and voice-over work. I advice other machinimatographers. I produce the 48 Hour Film Project for machinima, a real life contest. I run my own MMIF.org Machinima festival in Amsterdam/SL, and I recently started working with Tony Dyson (R2-D2 creator) to produce professional machinima productions.”

Chantal has won several awards, one of which she treasures is “Best Edit” in 2008 48HFP, when she was a contestant. She later became the producer of the event. She has created over 200 productions during the last four years. Check them out at http://youtube.com/user/ChantalHarvey .

What does Chantal foresee for machinima’s future?

“It will go mainstream. I cannot imagine it would not do that. It is fresh, young, growing; it has huge potential to go real life. TV stations all over the world are cutting down on production costs, I believe that if we add a little more professionalism to our films, they will be discovered and appear on TV, maybe even a movie,” she said.

To get to the LEA sim, Click Here for LEA Welcome Center/Exhibitions, LEA1 (211, 38, 21)

Netera Landar

Peter Greenaway Speaks at 48Hour Film Project Machinima 2010

Not long ago, I had a chat with Chantal Harvey. She talked about the 48 Hour Film Project Machinima 2010 event which had taken place recently. Most notably, she talked about a speech given in Second Life given by noted British Film director Peter Greenaway, held at the opening of the event, on Sept 23, 2010.

Greenaway opened his speech, "I just think I need to express my enthusiasm for what essentially is a new medium.” He noted machinima had been around for 12-14 years, and felt it had enormous potential in the future. But of the entries for the 48HFP, “I have to confess that I am somewhat disappointed.“ He called the majority of them as basically of what’’s been done before, “a broach ... of conventionality pushing ... machinima into backwaters that we’ve all seen.”

He called the arrival of machinima, “relative in a curious way to what I believe is the demise of cinema ... cinema is dead.” He felt after about 115 years, cinema had covered about every area and theme that it could. The movies, he felt, had been made for the masses, and was in decline as they moved on to other forms of entertainment, “cinema (was) created as a cheap form of entertainment for the proletariat. ... Where is the proletariat now?”

He noted the basic model for making cinema was the “Hollywood way,” in which it all began with a script, a text-based medium, “in a way, none of us have seen a film.” But movies were not simply fading away, but being replaced by something better, “I don’t think there’s any great reason to cry tears over the disappearance ... although we’re no longer in the age of cinema, we are in the age of the screen. ... What’s ahead of us is a thousand times far more exciting than what has been by.”

He talked about cinema being a descendant of the theater in ancient times, which changed to theatric displays in the Medieval Era. Then opera came to be, and then cinema. Television came to be in the middle of the 20th Century, but was not truly a replacement for movies, calling TV “present tense” and cinema “past tense.”

“Second Life has helped create a new arena, a new playground, a new examination of ways and means of how we can express ourselves in the world. But I suppose every medium ... is going to copy and ape what has just gone by.” Once again, he felt more originality was needed in machinima, feeling the producers needed to “break out of all those patterns of behavior.”

“I’m trained as a painter. I’m going to be provocative and say that most people are visually illiterate. ... the image always has the last word. ... I’m hoping and looking, and can see the potentiality of machinima to create a brand new and essentially visual phenomena .... don’t keep going back to the goddamed bookshop. Cinema knows it’s weak ... because it always goes back to the bookshop. Let’s find a wa y to break that reliance ... on text-text text. ... We’ve had about 8000 years of the textmasters. They govern the way we think, they’ve written our holy books. They’ve been very powerful because once upon a time, not that many of us were literate. So upon the top of the pyramid they sat.”

Greenaway talked about a “Second Guttenburg Revolution” of the Information Age, saying,”the textmasters have got to move over now for the imagemasters.“ He called motion pictures too text-based, “I’ve always complained that cinema is a hybrid media that can be deconstructed... a combination of theater, literature, and painting.“

Of the 48 hour time limit in the 48 HFP, “I feel ... that one of the greatest negativities in this is you have to make one of these things in a limited goddamed amount of time. That’s not the way artists work. ... But I understand these are the circumstances.” He commented that very few artists truly finish anything, although they certainly stop.

Of Second Life, he called it a place where people could be “building without gravity,” where “everybody can live in happy hour whenever they like,” and “the ability to handle huge rains. ... let’s not imitate the characteristics ... of technologies just gone by.”

After about twenty-five minutes, he was willing to answer questions, or statements, from the audience, “I really enjoy a fight, so if anyone wants to make a response, I’m here to be responded to.” Talking to one, he called one of the most notable recent developments in media was the invention of You-Tube, saying it eliminated the middleman between artist and viewer. Someone asked about getting around You-Tube’s 10 minute limit. Greenaway answered movies didn’t necessarily have to be 120 minutes. Of trends in motion pictures, he noted a study in Holland which concluded the average person was only going to the cinema about once every couple years.

After about 35 minutes, Greenaway began his conclusion, “I think I’ve bored you long enough,” and inspired the crowd to break new ground, “let's put new wine in new bottles.”

All the films of the 48 Hour Film Project Machinima Event had to have a journalist character named Jack/Jackie Schmidt, have water as a prop, and somewhere the line of dialogue, “There is one thing I can do that you can’t.” The winner was “The Lake” by Stone Falcon Productions. The runner-up was “Nihilist” by Grey Matter Films.

Video from Chantal Harvey
Chantal Harvey's Blog

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