Letter to Chris, Skoolaborate Japan Member

Hi Chris,
Thanks for such immediate feedback, I look forward to working with you.
At the moment one of the schools we are working with will be doing one machinima/sl class for this first semester, and rolling it out further in the second semester. I will also be working on a program which travels to various other schools assisting them in creating machinima using SL, all of which will feed back into Skoolaborate.
Our project website is at http://www.avatar-project.org which will be updated a lot over the coming months.
I am currently working on a small course which will take students through basic SL skills, into comic strip like machinima then finally a short film at the end. My initial idea for this is to have the kids playing out scenes from the future(of Melbourne or wherever) but I am sure this will evolve over time. The future theme works well with a lot of the mental health issues we are trying to address, but obviously so will many others, and what teachers and schools want will help shape it all further.
In terms of the building, I am happy to come in and meet you to help get some kind of structure up and running when we are both free. It would be great to have a few 'studios' that we could assign to kids and let them build their sets and props in, to let them set up their own virtual production companies and start building their own little creative groups, taking ownership of their creations.
I believe the best model for this kind of thing might be a theatre/hq/centre with a few studios attached(like hangars, or hollywood), all working seperately, to come together and compete in an online machinima festival(something our teachers/schools are already interested in). We could arrange prizes and sponsorship and use competition to get the kids making the machinima, and then collaboration to run the festival and machinima studios together. This way we can take time, find some good students to be heads of our 'studios' - then they could become part of some larger organisation which runs the Skoolaborate Machinima Studios (SMS, kinda catchy) and so on.
In this kind of scenario, I don't see language as an issue. We could all throw a great international film festival which all students attend and watch each others creations.
These are all just ideas, I tend to spew them out so feel free to take and leave what you choose.
Thanks again for getting in contact,
Chat soon,
Dale

>>>SENT IN REPLY TO THIS EMAIL

Hello, Dale. It was great meeting you at the VC today, and I hope to work with you on this machinima idea a bit more later in the year. I explained an idea to Jane that I'd like you to read and please tell me your thoughts as I would like to develop some type of project to do by this fall. Here's a copy of the email text I sent to her....

Hello, Jean. It was nice meeting you at the video conference today, and I appreciate the fact that you stayed awake despite the time and poor weather conditions back on the East Coast. I really like your ideas about the type of projects that you would like to do with your students, and I think some collaboration is definitely possible in the area of acting out plays or literary scenes through avatars. Machinima is just a term used to describe films created in virtual environments, and Second Life provides the best available toolset to create your own sets, costumes and gestures in the virtual world. One of my goals this year is to begin the process of making machinima on the Skoolaborate islands using a "studio area" and then filming scenes being performed by live avatars and editing them into some sort of movie. These movies can then be streamed in-world on video monitors placed on the Skoolaborate islands, or even posted to YouTube where the general public could watch them. I'd be very interested in finding a few others who would be willing to create a sub-group that will develop some sort of machinima collaboration on the island. What I envision is very similar to the way Lucasfilm (and just about every major studio these days) produces films from different locations around the globe. For example, you could have your students choose a scene, storyboard their shots, and do the live "acting" through their avatar while another school does the actual video capturing (filming) and editing, and yet another school designs the sets (or costumes if your kids don't have the time). I think this would be a great way to collaborate on a project from different areas around the globe and appeal to the different strengths and goals of each school involved in the project. It sounds like Dale is keen to the filming and editing aspects of machinima and has the equipment to do it. Since my kids are not very strong in their language ability, we could possible create sets and costumes leaving you to focus on your goal of getting your students to plan a scene, act it out, and reflect on the meaning of the language and context. Of course, this is just an example and we could find different combinations of duties to assign to each participating entity, but I think it may be an idea we can build from. I'm CCing this to Westley and Dale, so to anyone reading this, please tell me what your thoughts are...

Chris