Stranger 109

I must first start off by saying that I have not spent very much time in the Second Life world. Both as an extension of social networking culture and a tool for making machinima, it certainly possesses some great potential, and I plan to further investigate it. Today’s film, Lip Flap, takes a rather clever approach to exploiting one of the weaknesses of the Second Life engine. To be sure, this engine offers a robust ability to model whatever you can imagine with a rather intuitive user interface. But as with so many game engines, the ability to control facial expression or lip movements pose a hurdle for any machinimator. David Laundra tackles that challenge head on by making the inability of the characters one of the punchlines of this short but witty narrative of a couple preparing to go out for the night. Like so many machinima films that opt for comedy over drama, its humor draws upon quirks of the game and uses them as jokes.

Del insists that his partner Anya not wear her wings because it makes him uncomfortable the way they pass through his body when they dance, a joke about the game’s poor collision detection. In addition to some solid voice-over work and clever dialogue, Laundra never allows the piece to take itself too seriously. Some of the Second Life machinima I have seen tends to succumb to the hype of how great the game world can be, portraying utopian visions of equality not unlike the ones that once plagued the early days of the web. The film Better Life comes to mind if I must point a finger. But Lip Flap avoids that and takes a fun tongue-in-cheek poke at this often over-hyped virtual world.