Interviews with Producers, Tiffany Richter and Ryan Navaroli

Produced by Emanuel Gonzalez, Josh White, Lonnie Greenberg and Julia Marino

Interview with Executive Producer Zach Wise

Produced by Emanuel Gonzalez, Josh White, Lonnie Greenberg and Julia Marino

Impressions

Produced by Emanuel Gonzalez, Josh White, Lonnie Greenberg and Julia Marino

Interviews with the Code Team

Produced by Emanuel Gonzalez, Josh White, Lonnie Greenberg and Julia Marino

Interviews with Content Producers, Chad Stevens and Bob Sacha.

Produced by Emanuel Gonzalez, Josh White, Lonnie Greenberg and Julia Marino

The Soul of Athens project is in it’s final stages now. We have 11 days until launch as I’m writing this.

I wanted to share some of the new things we’re doing.

First of all, we are trying to make this a very “social” project. We have created a group on Flickr for the project called The Soul of Athens Group. Any images you add to the group will show up in the project. We want people who are part of the Athens community or visiting Athens, to show us what they think the soul of Athens is.

We are using Brightcove to distribute our Teasers, behind the scenes video, and also the stories.

We are using Basecamp by 37signals for collaboration among the producers. I don’t think we could have done this project without this incredible tool.

To get the word out about the project, we are using:

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As demonstrated in my earlier post, Second Life can never be properly explained in text. Even attempting to come up with a montage of scenes to capture the essence and possibilities of Second Life is difficult.

Andy (Marcellus Cantteneo), who believes that Second Life in its current state is only good for perverts and deviants, suggested he could smoke a bong. There was talk of following him to buy products that would make his avatar a fully equipped male. Yes, a penis.

“Yeah, drugs and sex are okay. Except when I mention alcohol I get a slap on the hand,” said Zach in exasperation.

I can only imagine what the others sitting around us in the Academic Advancement Center, thought about that conversation.

Ryan (Blargo Swindlehurst) was finally able to bring us back to the dialogue we were supposed to be writing, and the rough storyboarding of our actions. Zach seemed tired, but smiled, rubbed his forehead and commented on how glad he was we were doing this piece. According to him, it was a stress reliever. Soon after that he gathered his gear and left us to our own devices, probably wondering if that was such a good idea.

Even though we began our adventure around 3 p.m., filming didn’t begin until almost two hours later, however, as we spent way too much time exploring the capabilities of Second Life and teaching KidCharlie Congrejo how to fall off the roof on cue.

In the five hours we spent in the AAC we learned how to dance, how to push people out of our way, how to give each other clothing, tattoos and other items like hats and blunts. At one point I had to tell Marcellus to shut off his weapons (helpful hint: don’t have or use weapons on OU’s island, you will get kicked off).

KidCharlie, with his cape, straw hat, blunt and glass of water kept experimenting with the “drunk” gesture, trying to perfect his impending fall from the roof of the Arts & Music Center. Marcellus, having had to give up his weapons, would not stop dancing, using the most effeminate dance animation I had seen yet. Blargo kept changing his appearance every five minutes, so I kept losing track of where he was. At one point I overheard two women talking about how they came across what sounded like a nudist island.

It was a chaotic five hours in which we spent maybe half that time actually filming, and even after recording the audio I still have no idea how Blargo’s video will come out or how it will look. But if our experience was any indication, it will probably be just as chaotic and shocking, as it should be.

Check out some behind the scene photos. There is more where that came from so check back often.