For those interested in virtual world design and development, the literature that arose from the cyberpunk movement in 1980s is the most fertile ground to find inspiration and new ideas. William Gibson's Neuromancer in particular is the foundation for how some consider worlds like Second Life and their impact on society, law and culture. In this short video I attempt to translate my own reactions to the text, specifically its first sentence -- "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." -- to the popular form of virtual world expression known as machinima.

Machinima are interesting emerging cultural forms because they offer anyone the opportunity to create movies in a virtual world cheaply that would otherwise cost thousands, if not millions, of dollars. The location of Gibson's work, Chiba City in the metropolis Tokyo, required in my version a fly over of the city to emphasize the vast size of the dystopian world inhabited by the main character. Rather than pay a great deal for helicopter and high-qwuality cameras to do the job, I utilized the much cheaper but relatively good quality version of the city offered by Google Earth, which currently allows users to make and submit three-dimensional models of buildings in their cities.

Of course, machinima offer their own problems to the movie-maker. In order to place the avatar created to represent the main character within the footage I 'shot' of Chiba City, I had to create a giant green screen platform for him to stand on in Second Life, which was then replaced by the Google Earth footage. The difficulty of matching up these two cameras, the one in Google Earth and the one in Second Life, to sync and make a fluid sweeping motion was much too great to make a seamless shot.