Serendipity35

I suppose it was only a matter of time before this would happen in Second Life. Then again, I'm not so sure what actually happened.

In January 2007, a man named Molotov Alva, disappeared from his Californian home.

Recently, a filmmaker named Douglas Gayeton came across a series of video dispatches by someone of the same name in Second Life. Gayeton put them together into a documentary.

So what is real here? Is a Molotov a real person from California using that name in SL? Is this a story about a guy from Petaluma who leaves his first life for a search for answers in Second Life? Is it a new kind of promotional campaign? Or is it some indicator of how involved people can become in a virtual world?

In an interview, Douglas Gayeton said:

"I entered Second Life as "Gayeton Ringo" for the first time in June of '06. After traveling within the world for six months I came across the video diaries of Molotov Alva. I felt that they were the first truthful account of a person's introduction to a new digital world so I worked with him to bring them out of Second Life."

He came across them - or he created them?

And who created the YouTube site for molotovalva?

If you dig around online some (I did), you find that Gayeton = Alva (not a shock) and since Linden Labs (who own Second Life) have a policy in which SL residents retain the underlying intellectual property rights to content they create in that world, his machinima is all his.

HBO acquired the North America TV rights for the production (which had been called My Second Life) and plans to submit the film for an Oscar in the Animated Short Subject category. It would be the first movie shot entirely in an online
virtual world to be nominated if it makes the cut. HBO will screen it in a theater, maybe premiere it at Sundance, and air it next spring on HBO.

On the website for the film at molotovalva.com, I now find instead of "Episode 1" only a very brief promo and a "Coming Soon." The contact person for the project is in The Netherlands.

Who is Gayeton? He created a multimedia version of Johnny Mnemonic working with William Gibson and thereby the first interactive CD ROM. He pitched his SL project to Submarine.

Bloggers seem to think that this HBO deal will move machinima into a new acceptance as a creation tool for filmmakers.