an interview with machinima maker Bobby Ritt

Machinima Week brought some of Second Life’s most active machinima creators to Orange Island. Today, meet Bobby Ritt, a talented visual artist from France.

Who is Bobby Ritt ?
Bobby Ritt is my Second Life avatar name (IRL, my name is Matthew Tyas). He was born on December 1st 2007 and stays an average of 5 hours a day in Second Life. Bobby Ritt’s style (face and clothing) are exactly the same as in real life.

What is your background?
I’m a self-taught multimedia artist, doing digital music, photos and videos since the mid 90’s. I’ve always used Internet to publish my work, and I now work in R&D for virtual worlds.

How would you define your work?
My work is very hard to define, but cheap and cheerful would be a quick way to classify it. All my work is based on concepts, some are obvious, and some are only known to myself.

What gear & software would you recommend for machinima?
For making machinima, I’d first recommend having a good screen capturing software, I use fraps, very cheap, and works very well. The choice of the game engine depends so much on what you want to do, and the story you want to tell. But the most important these days, is mainly the post-production side, editing, mixing sound, and adding special effects.
As hardware goes, a good video card is always a good start, so is a large screen (useful for capturing in HD). And for SL, there is a great little kind of 3D mouse that exists (3Dconnexion) that can produce really nice and fluid camera movements, it’s great fun to use.
But the whole aim of machinima is to work fast, otherwise one would directly use 3D software like Blender, 3DS or Maya.

Which machinima communities / sources do you follow?
I’ve been in the machinimatographers SL group for a while, often a good source of information or help
Otherwise I visit machinima.com and machinima.fr every other week, and visit community sites like koinup or youtube.

What are your favorite SL Machinima pieces?
The one that no one has done yet. I’m dreaming of 3D films in virtual worlds, where spectators can have the choice of viewpoints, chose the actors if they don’t like the original ones, and have real freedom in the experience of watching the film. A bit like a video game really :)

Do you have a “machinima trick” you’d like to share ?
Eh… well each “trick” would depend on what 3D universe you’re using, but here are some simple and universal ones : capture video in the best quality possible, it’s always much prettier to scale down than to scale up.
Have fun trying out reversed filming, it can be quite useful. Also play around with the speed of your film, it’s sometimes much nicer to film someone moving slowly and then speeding it up, than filming in real speed.

What’s on your machinima-made-easier wishlist?
Inverse kinetics, recording and playback of avatar movements, like overdubbing actors, which would allow small teams, or a one man studio to film scenes with multiple actors.

What are your upcoming projects?
I’m looking into RealXtend a lot these days, I’m sure it will be a great place for machinima in the next few years (because of 3D object importing, shadows, and hopefully soon some kind of inverse kinetic system). Otherwise I’ll continue doing clips and other machinima films using SL, but these things do request time…

Websites:
www.mtyas.com
www.netvibes.com/mtyas

Video sites where your films can be seen:
http://www.koinup.com/mtyas/
http://www.dailymotion.com/mtyas
http://www.dailymotion.com/stonfield-inworld
http://www.youtube.com/mtyas

SL Locations featuring contents you made :
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Shopping%20Attitude/120/180/41
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ebeoplex/138/215/22

April 30, 2008 at 8:43 am | Uncategorized | No comment

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