Never Lost in a Crowd

As Marshall McLuhan wrote, "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." New technology, from the wheel to the printing press, has profoundly changed both mass culture and personal psychology. Although the full extent of each transformation can take generations to fully manifest, we can discern some of the implications in the present.

This week's Single Frame Stories prompt is "Anonymous." I was looking through some old images for another project and came upon a photo of a 1920's crowd scene. It suddenly struck me that if you didn't know anyone there, you would truly be just a face in the crowd. Today, you can post a Selfie and instantly establish a sense of personal identity within the mass audience. There are 90 million Selfies and counting on Instagram alone.

Our current pervasive social network is creating a retro-future morph of tribalistic narcissism. Ironically, we are  intensifying our sense of unique personal identity through the through the imagined eyes of a largely anonymous global crowd. Or if we're actually noticed, the feedback from a handful of strangers.

Thoughts on Dio and the Future of Linden Lab

My first dio space

I've got to hand it to Linden Lab. I was skeptical about the "Makers of Shared Creative Spaces" rebranding when they launched it last year. But it's turned out to be a fitting description for their emerging product portfolio. They seem to have a very clear vision for their future, which centers around creating platforms for people who like to create, share and enjoy user-generated content. Sure, it's not as revolutionary as Second Life. But empowering creativity is a worthy mission.

I've been playing around a bit with dio, which just went into open beta yesterday. Here's how they describe it:

dio places are personal and public spaces filled with pictures, video, text and even interactive objects. Places are arranged spatially so users can travel and explore streets, buildings, houses and cities -- just like they can in the real world!

Inara Pey posted a pretty good overview already, so I'll just share my first impression.

dio is off to a good start. It uses the conceptual metaphor of rooms and objects to create the psychological illusion of geography in a page-based interface. The design is clean. I was able to create a space and add content without too many missteps. There were about a hundred things I wanted to do that weren't supported yet, as I was putting my space together. But that's typical for such an early release. As a matter of fact, I'm glad they put this out early enough to direct their development based on user feedback.

I'll have more to report after I've spend more time with it. You can check up on my in-progress space here.







.

Neither Your Cute Cat nor Your Nude Girlfriend is the Message

Vine is a mobile app that lets you record and share ultra-short looping videos of up to six seconds each. Since six seconds is apparently too long for our withered attention spans to handle, the app makes it easy to combine even shorter clips, so a typical Vine is a loop of a few two-second segments. You can scroll through Vines in an endless stream of people hamming it up in the course of their daily activities:  cooking . . . shaving . . . playing with a pet . . . surprising their girlfriend in the shower. 

I have to admit, my first reaction to Vine was that the last thing society needs is another app for cute cat sharing. But as Martin Belam blogged, that misses the fun people have using the application and sharing with friends and family. From a personal standpoint, it's about the play, not the product.

On a deeper level, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, "The medium is the message." The long-term cultural impact of a new medium is vastly more profound than the specific content that is communicated. The simple presence of net-connected smartphones in our pockets is in the process of changing the world to a degree that will eventually be as significant as the wheel and printing press. 

Morgue Files #1: A Walk on the Wild Side

I've had a lot of ideas over the years that never made it out of sketch form. Given the sketchy nature of some of my work, I realize that may be hard for some readers to believe. But even a "Work In Progress" poster child ends up leaving a lot of dead ideas buried in napkins, notebooks and private files. To remedy this wasteful situation, I decided to periodically release work from my morgue files. They're all as half-baked as a Saturday Night Live sketch. Some didn't deserve to be realized more fully. Others had potential, but would take more time than I was willing to commit. In any case, I hope they'll be of passing interest to those who make similar decisions about their own work. Here's the first:

I love to make song parodies. Projects like Little Google Boxes and What if Rod Was One of Us were a lot of fun to make and people seemed to like them. Over the past couple of years, I've started a few other songs that never made it to finished form. This one is a few verses from a take off on Lou Reed's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side." It's acoustic guitar and vocals recorded with an iPhone. I ended up not moving forward because I didn't want to spend the time it would have taken to pull off a worthy video. Maybe someday. Right.

FTC Forces Second Life to Revise Misleading Online Ads

The United States Federal Trade Commission today determined that Second Life's "Become Your Avatar" campaign was intentionally deceptive. Linden Lab is now required to use depictions of humans and their avatars in a manner that is consistent with typical users, rather than the five people they were able to find who are actually as attractive as their virtual counterparts.

This ruling comes in the wake of the Manti Te'o imaginary girlfriend scandal. "If a college-educated man can be fooled by a falsetto voice on the telephone, how much more confusing would an encounter with a nubile young avatar be?"queried Myles Standish, FTC Special Agent in Charge.

Linden Lab has not yet commented on the decision, but has already replaced their original ads with new versions that meet FTC standards.

Laughing at a Funeral

Entry for "Service," this week's Single Frame Stories Challenge.

This week's Single Frame Stories entry is based on a true story. Not one I'm proud of. Something that still makes me cringe fifteen years after the fact.

I'm not a churchgoer. Just weddings and funerals. This particular funeral was for a co-worker’s stillborn baby. Sad. Truly sad. The service was held at one of those modern suburban mega-churches. The bereaved had been very active in the congregation. The football field size parking lot was packed.

It started out as one might expect. Prayers. Sermons. Heartfelt speeches by friends and family. Although I wasn’t comforted by assurances that the baby was in heaven with Jesus, the sincere love expressed by community members was heartwarming. It was all going well until five middle aged guys with matching suits and haircuts walked onto the stage to do a song.

Damn. I felt a flashback coming on. Not an acid trip. A Simpson’s episode. The acapella quintet started singing an uptempo gospel song. Right out of the fifties. Complete with a doo-wop bass singer. I began to lose it, struggling to suppress the maniacal laughter that threatened to burst into the mourning hall.

I stole a quick glance at my wife for some grounding. Bad idea. She must have seen the episode too and was also fighting for control. We cast our eyes down, gritted our teeth and covered our faces. We prayed for the performance to stop before we embarrassed ourselves and ruined the moment for the five hundred other people who were clearly moved, swaying their arms in born-again ferver.

No luck. It went on and on. Verse after verse. Chorus after chorus. Jamming every stereotypical Sha Na Na riff in the book. The absurdity of their white bread unconsciously retro exuberance for a glorious heaven was killing us. Finally, they stopped. The service concluded. We snuck off to our car.

I hope that if anyone noticed our choked back giggles, contorted red faces and tear stained eyes, they thought it was due to cathartic grief. Maybe it was.

Sorry is the Hardest Part

I've been a fan of Beck since I heard "Loser" back in 1994. His latest work, Song Reader, isn't an audio recording. Instead, he's released twenty new songs as a collection of sheet music, inviting people to record and share their own interpretations. Although the design of the collection is nostalgic, the concept of fostering crowd-sourced creativity is cutting edge.

I loved the idea when I first heard about the project and pre-ordered a copy back in August. Unfortunately, when I received the beautifully done package in December, I had just come down with a cold. It ended up turning into a frustrating month of sore throat and minor laryngitis. I'm finally on the mend. Talking is fine. Singing is still sketchy.

Despite my croaking, I've been playing through some of the songs over the past month. I fell in love with one in particular, "Sorry," and haven't been able to get it out of my mind. I finally broke down over the weekend and decided to record it, thinking I could come back with a replacement vocal track and some harmonies when I'm back up to full strength. I ended up actually liking the slightly wavering and pitchy vocal that emerged for its vulnerability. It goes well with the feel of the track, especially when paired with this edit of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I held off listening to other people's renditions until I cut my own track. They range from avante garde to folk to rock. Some are great. Some not so great. But it's fascinating to hear how different people interpret a song they've only encountered through the sheet music.

Tier Don't Matter: A Crystal Clear Depiction of Why Second Life Isn't Growing

There's been a lot of discussion recently about why Second Life's growth is stagnant . . . Is tier too high? Is the Marketplace eroding land ownership? Are wakadoodles ruining things for everyone?

Those factors may explain why some current users are cutting back on land ownership or even bailing out altogether. But they have nothing do with why hundreds of thousands of new registrations a month translate into zero growth in active users. There's one overwhelming roadblock to Second Life's growth. It's the terrible new user experience. See for yourself.

I shot these two videos a couple of years ago. The first video walks through IMVU's new user experience to provide context. The second follows a new user from clicking a Second Life banner through the first experience of rezzing. As you watch, notice factors that might motivate a typical new user to keep going, and at which points it seems they'd likely bail out and uninstall.

Post-Pretentious Artist's Statement

Another MovieStorm for iPad video. 

Tinkerbell in Hell

I've been playing around a bit in IMVU while researching alternatives to Second Life's land-based business model. Along the way, I came up with the concept of "Tinkerbell in Hell" for this week's Single Frame Stories challenge. The prompt was "flight." I shot this video and a still photo in IMVU.

Should Linden Lab Coerce Merchants Into Second Life Land Ownership?

Shockwave Yareach proposed a provocative solution to the shrinking Second Life grid last week. His idea is that merchants should be be required to own land for the privilege of offering goods for sale on the Marketplace:

Linden Lab's making land irrelevant for shoppers means businesses aren't keeping stores in-world anymore. Thus the funds to keep the sims up is going away, and the sims are going away too . . . The solution is to put limits on the Marketplace. The number of square meters you own divided by 100 and added to 10 is the number of items you can have on the Marketplace.

Ironically, Linden Lab's successful promotion of the Marketplace has had the unintended consequence of depressing land ownership. Nevertheless, I think Shockwave's idea would do little to revitalize Second Life's declining grid.

The reason merchants elect to bail out from stores in in Second Life is that they don't generate enough sales to cover their costs. That's sometimes due to poor products or bad decisions about location or marketing. But the recent mass migration seems to be caused by a significant number of residents choosing to shop on the web instead of on the grid. Unfortunately, requiring merchants to pay for land they can't monetize would simply drive away content creators and reduce the number of virtual goods available to Second Life users.

Adding new regions offers no inherent benefit for Second Life users. The majority of current regions are usually unpopulated. Take a look at the map at any time of the day and there are only scattered concentrations of green dots. What Second Life needs is more users and more attractions, not more land.

The challenge Linden Lab faces is declining revenue. I think the problem is that they've reached the limit of their tier-based business model. Second Life is mostly funded today by handful of very large land holders. The growth market for Second Life are the millions of potential casual users whose primary interest would virtual goods and entertainment, not land.

My advice to Linden Lab would be to transition to a business model that is focused more on monetizing the sale of virtual goods, rather than the sale of virtual land. I'll explore that idea in a future post.

Now For Something Completely Silly

I enjoyed the last week of virtual world speculation, but this year was supposed to be about the fun. So here's something completely silly. It's a slightly edited version of the original trailer for The Attack of The Fifty Foot Woman, with a soundtrack I created on an iPhone with AutRap.

Who Will Determine the Future of Virtual Worlds?

How Marketers See Virtual Worlds

There was a lot of discussion last week about the past, present and future of virtual worlds. Here are a handful of quotes from blog posts, comment sections and social networks to show the diversity of perspective and opinion:

The metaverse is about having “fun.” It is a playground – pure and simple. And this is how it should have been marketed from the get-go. Elif Ayiter

Can someone show me a use case for Cloud Party that isn't already filled by SL and IMVU???? Brenda Archer

Virtual reality is when virtual worlds will thrive, IMO. Occulus Rift is a good start. Anyone read Otherland? If it ever reaches that stage there will be more people in virtual worlds than in the real world. Theodore DuCasse

My over-arching point really is that (typical) Internet consumers will reach for the things that are easy and hassle free to operate, and still offer powerful social connectivity. Tim Stewart

I think that sadly, the number one place we could have looked to save Second Life was in the seemingly forgotten game tools from a year ago. If LL decided to buckle down and create game development tools that allowed startups and small companies to essentially create MMORPGs inside Second Life, that could have a tremendous impact. caliginousrival 

Ultimately the question echoes your realization; is the Metaverse really meant to be just worlds like Second Life and Opensim, or can we broaden our horizons and create a system that can grow and evolve to find new kinds of worlds? Personally I believe it's the latter and am doing what I can to help create it. Alan Tupper

After a week of pretty focused thought on the topic, I think it comes down to what Alan Tupper expressed in the quote above. The future of virtual worlds is going to be determined by those who are creating them in the present: The people who are developing and operating the platforms; and the user communities who are pioneering new ways to actualize the platforms' potential and demonstrating their value.

Virtual World Killer Apps - First in a Series

Virtual Worlds in the Unforeseeable Future

In short, the virtual worlds paradigm is an also-ran in the marketplace and there is no indication of a significant positive change for the foreseeable future. That's why my optimism is for the future we can't foresee, which will be the focus of the concluding post in this series. Second Life vs. The World.

Before I play Nostradamus and try to predict the unforeseeable future, I want to reply to those who disagreed about my assessment of the present and near future.

A number of people mentioned the Gartner Hype Cycle which tracks new technologies through what Gartner sees as a predictable life-cycle. Inara Pey and Dale Innis both proposed that virtual worlds are in the "Trough of Disillusionment":

As it stands, Gartner see VWs only now starting to climb out of the "Trough of Disillusionment" which results from the period of over-inflated hype about a new product. Further, they place the emergence of VWs as a widely-adopted, productive technology as still being 5-10 years hence. Inara Pey in a comment

I took at look at a few of Gartner's most recent reports and I thought they painted a much less positive picture for the future. They report declining interest in education, the consumer space and the business market, with no prediction of significant success in the future:

Without a clear audience value proposition across multiple age groups and sectors, early interest in social worlds has declined . . . . In the short term, virtual worlds remain a "sandbox" environment for experimentation in training, community outreach and collaboration, but the buzz has died, and enterprise interest remains static. In the longer term, virtual environments still represent useful media channels to support and engage with communities in an immersive fashion, but they appear unlikely to induce transformational change.  Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2012 

This series of posts began by asking if our virtual world dream was over. I think Gartner's phrase, transformational change, is a good description of the hopes we had for virtual worlds. We didn't see Second Life as just a place for us to hang out and enjoy ourselves.  Many of us believed that virtual worlds would eventually have a tangible positive influence on our overall society by empowering personal expression and creativity, promoting tolerance and diversity, providing a global marketplace providing economic opportunities, etc.

I still believe in that vision because I've personally experienced the virtual world's potential to actualize such lofty aims on the small scale. But I don't see any clear path to wider acceptance. Second Life, the 1000 pound Gorilla in the virtual worlds market space, is a long shot. Their technological platform is ten years old and riddled with technical debt. Their brand is more associated with flying penises and cross-gender affairs than as a credible platform for the general public. Linden Lab's R&D is  focused on other products rather than pushing Second Life to the next level.

I think OpenSim providers have a great opportunity over the next few years to capture significant segments of Second Life's customer base, especially companies like Inworldz who are investing in moving the technology forward. Their main challenge is in wooing enough content creators to create a robust marketplace. But I don't think OpenSim has any better prospects than Second Life for breaking into general use, since the product, even with improvement, is just a clone of Second Life.

There are a number of business oriented vendors that provide 3D meeting and exhibit spaces, such as Altadyn and VenueGen. Although there are niche markets for those services, their value proposition isn't that compelling in relation to 2D solutions such as GoToMeeting.

Finally, there are a few emerging general use platforms such as Jibe and Cloud Party. It will be interesting to see how they evolve, since they are not tied to kludgy legacy code or change-resistant user communities. The challenge is that we still haven't found that compelling use case . . . the killer app . . . which will open up the public's eyes to the power of the virtual world paradigm. Although I have no idea what that magic idea will be, I have a few idea of how we might get there:

• Developing iteratively with active user participation. Using an agile approach, the direction of a product is guided by the emergent priorities and requirements of engaged users. The only way to end up with a product that is better than we can initially imagine, is to move forward in collaboration with both the customer and the emerging product itself. I've seen this time and time again in products my company has built for corporate customers.

• Focusing on providing a compelling solution to a specific audience for a specific purpose. There's currently too much attention on product features and technology instead of creating compelling solutions for specific use cases and clearly defined user groups. 

• Creating an Open Services platform that encourages other players to add value. Second Life took this approach to a limited extend by allowing people to create and sell content on their platform. But they've turned away from supporting third party viewers, interoperability between grids and third-party marketplaces.`I would love to see Cloud Party or Jibe create open APIs that allow third party applications to easily integrate with their platforms.

So that's my Nostradamus act for today. It's been interesting thinking about this stuff again and I appreciate everyone's comments and the ongoing discussion.

Second Life Seen From The Future: A Music Video Interlude

As I was wondering what virtual worlds might be like twenty years from now, I began to imagine how today's Second Life might seem to us in retrospect. Crap Mariner had just tweeted about some new words being added to Shatoetry, so I started playing around and ended up with this music video.

Second Life vs The World

(Continues Virtual Worlds: Is the Dream Over)

Second Life may be the center of the (virtual) world to us, but it's like a once promising frontier boom town that's stagnating in the midst of a global explosion of modern metropolises. When I started out in Second Life in 2008, it seemed that it was destined for mainstream acceptance on the heels of incredible user growth, positive press, corporate initiatives by global corporations and what appeared to be a strong commitment by Linden Lab to invest in the future of the platform. 

I was lucky enough to attend a few of the big virtual world industry events in 2008 and 2009. (I still have a Second Life t-shirt I snagged at their booth.) The vision at the time was that the virtual world paradigm would eventually become as ubiqtuous as the 2D internet. I remember sitting at a table with executives from IBM, HP and Northrop, discussing how collaboration in virtual worlds would be a common business practice within a few years. On the consumer side, there were exhibits from dozens of vendors who were investing in new products and services, hoping to cash in on what they saw as a significant near term opportunity.

By the end of 2009, growth and enthusiasm begin to stutter and stall, including Second Life. Despite (or because of) Linden Lab's repeated attempts over the last four years to regain positive momentum, the downward trend continues. In 2012, Second Life lost over 10% of its regions. The handful of other surviving virtual worlds such as Twinity and Blue Mars have fared even worse. Although OpenSim gets a lot of attention in the virtual world community, it's just a blip on the map with an estimated 20,000 active users. 

During that same period of time, social networks, MMORPGs, casual gaming and even 3D chat services have been growing astronomically and winning users in the millions, tens of millions and even hundreds of millions. In short, the virtual worlds paradigm is an also-ran in the marketplace and there is no indication of a significant positive change for the foreseeable future. That's why my optimism is for the future we can't foresee, which will be the focus of the concluding post in this series.

(By the way, I realize that some reader will want to dispute the accuracy of the reported user statistics. I agree that the numbers in the chart are based partially on self-reported figures, various definitions of active users, and very different business models. But you can slice 25% from everyone's reported numbers and the underlying picture of Second Life vs The World would be the same.)

Second Life Acceptance in Mainstream Culture: A Comic Interlude

Virtual Worlds: Is the Dream Over? - Part One

Extropia Burning

After contemplating the latest Second Life drama over the weekend, I realized that one reason we're so sensitive about the future of Second Life is that we emotionally equate Second Life's downward trajectory with our own future within virtual worlds. I understand that point of view.

• OpenSource grids aren't expanding the virtual world market; they are currently surviving by capturing a sliver of those abandoning Second Life. Relatively few of the thousands of private islands disappearing from Second Life are reappearing on other worlds.

• Although thousands of Second Lifers have established a presence on other worlds, there has been no mass movement. ManySL expatriates still spend the majority of their time, energy and money back on Mother World, rather than focusing on community building in their new homelands.

• Most SLers have thousands of virtual goods locked up in Second Life that can't be legally or easily exported. Few Second Life creators have exported their work to marketplaces on other grids, so even if we had the money to spend, we couldn't replace our current SL assets.

• Although a few new virtual world platforms have launched, they have yet to gain much traction within the current virtual world community; none has made a splash outside that domain.

It seems to me that the virtual world market has been declining in step with Second Life for the past five years. New players have come and gone, not one gaining significant traction. Even Linden Lab has stopped viewing virtual worlds as their most compelling future. That's why they're shifting investment into new projects instead of reinvesting in Second Life. 

I've been to a number of virtual world conferences over the past six years. It's obvious that our collective vision of the virtual world future has been shrinking. We once expected virtual worlds to change the way most people work, live and play; to change the world! Today, the industry is mostly looking to offer some practical solution to a niche market such as training, education or meetings. Despite the efforts of a number of credible offerings, I can't think of a single industry or domain where the use of virtual worlds is considered a best practice, or even a credible alternative.

Although I've painted a fairly dark picture about the future of virtual worlds, I'm actually optimistic about the future of the Virtual World. I'll describe my vision of the virtual future in the next post of this series.

My Take on the Amazon Game Category Controversy

Current secondlife.com main image

A promotion for Second Life on Amazon sparked a controversy yesterday, centering on the virtual world's placement in the Video Game category. Tateru Nino wrote:

". . . it is certainly embarrassing to be associated with the idea of Second-Life-as-a-game. Many folks do consider we dedicated Second Life users to be a bit crazy because we ‘play’ this ‘game’, when they know from having tried it that it is not one. The ‘game’ label seems to make most people unable to look beyond it, and see its essential potential (realised and unrealised, both) as a content platform."

Gaga Gracious posted:

"If it wasn't for the fact Linden Lab is headed by a game's industry heavy weight like Robvik Humble I think they could be forgiven for marketing Second Life as a game package on Amazon recently when everyone that knows the beleaguered virtual world and has experienced it would, in the majority, be inclined to say it is not a video game".

Although I sympathize with the general objection to categorizing Second Life as a game, the criticism is misplaced in this instance. This move isn't a reflection of some overall Linden Lab initiative to reposition Second Life as a game, it's because Amazon's program to distribute software linked to outside accounts is called Game Connect:

Game Connect is a service provided by Amazon which enables customers to discover and purchase virtual items on Amazon.com and have these virtual items sent directly to their linked game account . . . Customers can link their existing Amazon.com accounts with their account in your game to purchase digital items, delivered directly to their linked game account.

Take the time to click through Second Life's primary web presence and it's easy to see that Linden Lab is not marketing Second Life as a video game. What they're doing with Amazon and Steam is adding distribution channels equipped to sell their software.

One evokes fear. The other delight.

One reason I love mobile creative apps is that they entice me to learn the messages of their mediums. Not in a culture changing McLuhanesque sense, but in the way they speak to me in collaborative play. I'm usually surprised by what emerges. It is only in retrospect that I figure out how we got there and what lessons might be be applied to future projects.

Here are a couple of videos created with with WaveCamera and VJAM. I didn't have anything particular in mind when I started. Each emerged through iterations of improvisation with each app. The first ended up evoking fear. The second delight.

Unplugged

My entry in this week's Single Frame Stories challenge

I'm one of "those people" who perceive their avatar persona as a vital and active presence. Like ventriloquist Jeff Dunhan said "I know the dummies aren't alive, but they certainly live in my consciousness." (And what could be a better endorsement of sanity than a quote from a ventriloquist?) Anyway, when I contemplated "unplugged," Whiskey's prompt for this week's Single Frame Stories challenge, the line that came to mind was "My Muse doesn't turn off with the electricity."

You may be wondering why I posted this less than a week after swearing off virtual identity as a focus for the blog. I can explain in one word: Metaphor. Okay. Maybe a few more words than one. I experience the avatar persona as a personification of creative genius.

from L. genius "guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth; spirit, incarnation, wit, talent;" also "prophetic skill," originally "generative power," from root of gignere "beget, produce" From Online Etymology Dictionary

When I looked that up, I was surprised and gratified to find that the root meaning is related to begetting and producing rather than high intelligence. Avatar persona seems to act in that way for many people. It taps into latent creative potential and actualizes it through creative work.

Dichotomies of Sight and Sound

One of the ideas I've been playing around with recently is the combination of unexpected combinations of musical and visual performance. Here are a couple of working concept videos that used iPhone and iPad tools to create the effects.

The first is an animation created with MovieStorm to lip-sync The Speed of Sound by Tech N9ne. The second was created using Mojo Masks to overlay a realtime mask on a live performance video capture.

Botgirl Does It Madmen Style

I spent about forty hours of my December vacation watching five seasons of Mad Men. It made me realize that that my blogging ennui was mostly due to the fact that I didn't have a cool opening video. No. Not really. But the process of creating my own version of the iconic Mad Men motion graphics was incredibly satisfying.

It would have been a much less fulfilling experience if I'd have slammed it out in a couple of days and posted the first full draft. That's exactly what would have happened if I wasn't on a self-imposed publishing moratorium. I would have visualized the concept of replacing the businessman with Botgirl and stopped there. Instead, I refined the video through multiple iterations over the course of a few weeks.

The initial challenge was figuring out how to recreate the look and feel of the falling character and stylized set. I set up a single building in Frameforge, textured it with a couple of my Second Life images, and captured a mono-color character falling from a few different angles. I loved the first draft, but it was little more than a proof of concept.

Over the next couple of weeks I went through a dozen iterations: I added red hair, nails and high hails to the character; created additional buildings; added new animations and shots; added the opening sequences in the office; created a cover version of the theme song in GarageBand; experimented with different filter looks; and finally added the closing shot of the reclining figure. After exporting the animation, I did a quick edit to the original RJD2 music theme.

Although I could certainly refine it even more, I'm very happy with the current version and decided it was done for now.

It's good to be back!