NMC Campus Observer

Symposium on Creativity: Thursday Highlights

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Aug 16, 2007 08:56pm

While Wednesday was a less fully scheduled day, that’s over, so for Thursday it was another jam packed day here at the NMC Symposium on Creativity.

First up at 9:00 AM, Buhbuhcuh Fairchild from Alt-Zoom Studios presented an Intro to Machinima – a repeat of his session earlier in the week. This dog was napping, for those who are interested, we did score a chat log transcript of the first session. As a special, neat thing to share, we used a new tool created by Kisa Naumova, than processes those dry old text transcripts into a pretty chatlog — this tool fetches the icons from each avatars profile (a good reason to update your profile if you have not done so), and generates a more pleasant log:

See the chat log for Intro to Machinima. And not only does this tool provide this feature, each chat log can be tagged, so you can see all the ones for the symposium… But wait, there’s more! The chat log site indexes all participants, so you can also track say, each chat log that features Desideria Stockton.

That’s a diversion, but the chat log is there for Buhbuhcuh’s session- http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=58

A little after 11:00 AM< I stumbled into an impromptu lesson from Lyr Lobo- she showed a bunch of us how to twist and twirl to make one prim bar stools and lamps.

Always generous, she doled out cool tips and textures. So if you every bump into Lyr Lobo, your are more likely than not to walk away having learned something from her.

At noon, Dan Undertone (aka Dan Zellner, Northwestern University) came to lead a session on Improvisation and Second Life:

Improvisation has been and is presently used by theatre artists and others as a way to create, educate, and entertain. In this session participants will participate in some basic improv games (partner and group games) and discover the creative potential inherent in these techniques. We will also start to play with the new voice chat now inlcuded in Second Life.

Building on his experience teaching these workshops in Second Life, Dan gave another group this fabulous experience of expressing oneself and interacting in SL through movement.

Later in the afternoon, Sage Duncan (aka Stacey Fox, University of Kansas) returned to give another audience the chance to Be a Rock Star in Second Life — this time she had her music streaming attached to our land, so once learning about making instrument prims, animating them, we had a lot of fun pretending to be rock stars- here’s a really quickly done video using my snapshots from this session — watch the video to see how much fun it was!

At 5:00 Finn1 FLintlock (aka Elaine Polvinen, Buffalo State College) was here to demonstrate Expeditious Fashion Basics with a Creative Twist — demonstrating a wide range of avatar clothes for men and women designed be she and her students. In this session, she shared this as videos and acted out all of the steps in real time to show us how easy it was to have some respectable, yet stylish, clothing in Second Life.

You can check out the videos yourself, as well as some other related resources, at:
http://facstaff.buffalostate.edu/polvinem/SL/vid_tut.htm

Whew, what a day! Again!

Story filed under: Campus Headlines,What's Happening
Tags: slcreativity
See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)