Announcing Stömol

Things have been a bit quiet on this blog (and on my Flickr stream) recently. You noticed, right? Of course you did. Well, for the last eight months I’ve been working on a pretty large machinima project, a full-blown science fiction movie called Stömol – all filmed in Second Life. It’ll be about an hour long and will feature an original soundtrack by a very talented friend of mine. Without wanting to employ hyperbole, I don’t think anything quite like this has been done before, and I’m looking forward to its release very much.

When will that be? Initial filming is about two-thirds done and after that I’ll have sound editing to do (no small task). The earliest I can imagine the movie being released, then, is next April, though it might well be later than that.

Creating a movie in SL is something I’ve intended to do for a long time now. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in machinima here and there, creating my ‘moving postcards’ series and then the science fiction short, ‘Pioneers’ – all of which you can view on my YouTube channel. Stömol is in a different league from these efforts: so far, the movie contains nearly 800 individual clips (and many more than this were filmed, with hundreds of clips ending up discarded on the ‘cutting room floor’).

It took me a long time to finally summon the motivation to embark upon a project this large. A lot of this reticence was down to knowing I did not have all the skills needed for it, and would have to do some serious learning along the way. Indeed, I’ve learned a lot about filming in SL since I started in February, and over the coming months before the movie’s release I’ll be sharing some of this learning in a series of blog posts. Hopefully, this will be of use to anyone thinking about a similar venture.

Anyway, I thought it was time I announced the project, and to give you a flavour of the look of the film I made the teaser poster above.

Stay tuned for more…