Location: Ceci’s Cinema, Ochreous Sim

I was quite impressed at a recent showing of Cecil Hirvi’s latest film, “To My Beloved,” set in the era of Mao’s rise to power.  This machinanima was developed for education. Frankly, what Cecil, his sponsor, and the others involved in this production have done could not easily or cheaply be done in real life.

I now have at least one more answer when educators ask “what can you do with Second Life?“

Cecil writes:

Paul Portuges, a professor in the cinema dept. at UCSB commissioned me to do this film based on some of his writings. I choose to do “To my Beloved” because it involved a very intense poem about love involving Mao Tse Tung, founding chairman of communist China.

The film isn’t really about Mao but about the passion his second wife had for him and I decided to shoot it in SL to see if I can accurately capture a distant time in China and hopefully give a richer picture of who the main character (Kai-hui) was when she wrote these love letters.

Also, I wanted to see how easy or difficult it would be to get help from people living in China via SL. As it turns out, it was quite easy!  A friend of mine turned me on to a young man who lives in China and had actually seen rare video of Kai-hui.  He designed the clothing for the main character based on that.  Also, I was able to talk about some aspects of Chinese culture with other people from China, which helped me flesh out some of the settings. 

The film was mostly shot on a beautifully rendered sim run by Snakekiss which captures the feeling of China I think.  The film is showing in SL here:

Cecil’s Cinema http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ochreous/96/150/0

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