You can watch the video here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl1mimqvn_c].
A Word
About The Expo
The Machinima Expo was founded by RICKY GROVE, an amazing man
himself. He’s proudly an ex-Hollywood
actor after a long successful “film/TV” career, and today he is on the most
wanted list for machinima voice talent.
Ricky likes the independence that machinima provides the producer. Now, a big part of Ricky’s life has been
producing Machinima Expo, in its fifth year.
The 2012 expo producers were Ricky Grove, Pooky Amsterdam, and Kate
Fosk. The screening team was Sean
“Armanus” Heimbuch, Damien Valentine (Darth Angelus), Ricky Grove, thebiz,
Eddie Dugan, and Kate Fosk. I was honored to be part of the juried panel,
and in very good company (Joseph Farbrook, Frank Dellario, Susan Johnston, Phil
Rice).
See the Machinima Expo site for info on the upcoming festival, and who’s
who and what’s what. When you are
there, check out Hypatia Picken’s commissioned trailer promoting the festival. I also had the wonderful honor of
interviewing Ricky for the November issue of Best of SL Magazine in the on-going series, Masters of
Machinima. Read the complete BOSL feature story online or in-world. Pickens was featured in an earlier BOSL
edition.
The thing about The Machinima Expo, especially for SL filmmakers,
we get to see what others are doing in other platforms – and they get to see
what we are doing inside Second Life.
There is a long tradition of live music in Second Life, and with talents
like The Follow, Mankind Tracer, and many others – machinima seems to be a
creative tool that has helped in the promotion of these bands. In another sense, a good story told through
music, with some good visuals, offers great potential for bringing together
audio and visual elements in unique presentation.
Going
GA-GO for Machinima
Music and Machinima go together like birds and feathers, hot dogs
and baseball, apple pie and Mom, and so forth. Sometimes you happen upon an event that
sparks your interest. This time, the
spark for this column came from my interview with Ricky Grove, and began to
evolve from there. All the pieces –
machinima and music and the Expo fell in place last Friday when I was teleported
into an amazing event by Belinda, a.k.a. producer of Gangnam Furry Style SL machinima.
She makes no apologies for her love of music and machinima, and a heavy
dose of post-production. So, of course,
she would bring me to the GA-GO concert.
It was part of a larger live music event that day, but what got our
attention was - its founder Takuma “Gago Gigamon” calls his band – a machinima
band. He literally put on an explosive
show, lots of lights and even GA-GO dancers! Pounding beats, lots of enthusiasm
and a Westernized rock-n-roll high fashion sense were other ingredients.
One can trace the art of dance to the visual arts historically,
and more recently contemporary media has illustrated the relationship between
music and film through the birth of MTV (which is so far from its original
mission, but that is a different story).
I could further point to the link between animation and music, and that too
has had a long path. Think
Beatles. Think Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Full
Metal Jacket – does that ring a bell?
That’s only a few examples.
Some producers have enhanced silence films with soundscapes and
music-scapes transforming the meaning of the visuals. I consider music machinima as an important aspect
of our media culture, popular and alternative. I wrote in depth about that in my book, Machinima (with L. Runo, McFarland,
March 2012), and I credit much to R. Murray Schafer (Tuning of the World, 1977) and Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky, MIT
Press) for opening my ears to a whole new sonic world more than a decade
ago.
Add to that, I had an opportunity to study the influence of Japanese
sound culture and music on Western culture; I found that an extraordinary
learning experience. Henry David
Thoreau’s was inspired by Eastern philosophers and their ways of turning into
the environment. For Thoreau, he tapped
also into the burgeoning industrial soundscape of modernity (a phrase coined by
sound historian Emily Thompson). Japan
is both a visual and listening culture.
There is a respect for silence in public places, along with a continual
appreciation of natural environments and their sonic persona. It is
a sense of knowing time and place, understanding the need for silence on one
hand, but totally getting the need to push the envelope at times. There is a time to totally let loose and let
technology have its say. The surge of
creativity can be heard and seen through anime and other visual art forms. Music
is shared via those experiences.
Japan’s Visual Aesthetic
In the book Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime (by Mark W. Macwilliams, 2008, M.E. Sharpe), there is a quote by Jean Marie Bouissou that makes note of the Japanese “aesthetic of excess, conflict, imbalance, and overt sensuality.” Some of that visual aesthetic is captured in GA-GO’s machinima, filmed by SL MAG’s umekobutya Beck. There is definitely a Western sensibility in the machinima, and plenty of James Bond-like action. Takuma is a RL rock singer, and he puts on a high intensity rock show in SL. That kind of feeling is captured in the well-produced machinima.
Takuma told me, “the ‘possibility of new music’ can be pursued in
the virtual world. ‘GA-GO SL Ver’ is a Japanese machinima rock band.” The
band is a virtual take of the RL band, and it’s based on the “hot 80's rock
music scene, with a very heavy, loud sound and experience in entertainment,”
and when you can hear Takuma “shout out and the audience responds in Second
Life,” he says, “It's insane!” He
enjoys the diversity among his listeners/viewers, and hopes his music “resounds
in the souls of young and old who find this an exciting dream in a chaotic
age.”
The band members in SL differ from RL members. The SL members are builders and creators, and
help with the lighting, dance and overall production of the show. Setsuna is a builder who has been involved in
the creation of the Miss Virtual World stage and the sim build for the Ashraya
Project.
Takuma feels fortunate to hear his songs in SL, for it has made possible what he thought to be an impossible expression. To him “the place of expression is Second Life,” a virtual world that allows for new music and new ideas.
In RL, the band is simply known
as "GA-GO" and they are very active in Kansai, Japan.
Special thanks to Sakurako Watanbe, owner of the Kumashon Shopping Mall, for hosting the SL event shown in some of the above photos (taken by S.F.).
Official GA-GO Web Site
(translated)
Machinima Expo
BEST OF SL Magazine
Bel and I will see you at the MACHINIMA EXPO.
The Professional Machinima Artist Guild and Lowe Runo Productions graciously host Magnum: The Machinima Review.
