ART 343-Machinima

Our group, Jett Chapman, Max Simone, and myself, decided on reenacting a portion of the very intense documentary "The Bridge" by Eric Steele. We chose to focus on one particular man, Gene Sprague, who took his life on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004. We found a beautifully rendered replica of the bridge in Second Life and created an avatar that looked similar to Gene Sprague. We used audio and some video from the documentary along with scenes filmed in Second Life to create our machinima. Over all, I am pleased with how the machinima turned out. It is an interested concept in my mind of creating a documentary, which is supposed to be all about capturing something that is real, but doing so in a virtual environment. I think the actual documentary footage we used is very powerful, but after watching in class and seeing the other students reaction feel it would have been more powerful had we just used the footage of Mr. Sprague jumping from the bridge. We could have created the entire rest of the machinima in Second Life and left the part he jumps off as real footage, just to remind the viewer that it in not all fantasy.