Computer Graphics World

Welcome to My Life e documentary is Escoriaza's first feature film. He, along with a small crew, began working on the project in early 2006 and completed it just in time for its debut at the SXSW film festival in the spring of 2008. Since then, Second Skin has been shown at other festivals and will hit select theaters this spring, followed by a DVD release shortly thereafter. So what made Escoriaza choose such an unusual subject matter? As the filmmaker tells it, he was introduced to these alternate worlds by two avid players: his brother, Victor (one of the film's producers), and a mutual friend. "Just going into a virtual setting for the first time and seeing these other people interacting with each other in this alternate world was amazing," he says. "Our friend had all these responsibilities in the game and was getting married in real life. It took a strange turn because he was so invested in the game that he had diffi- cultly managing his time between the two worlds—the real and the virtual—because both were important to him." As it so happened, Escoriaza had started a documentary company with Second Skin's other producer, Peter Schieffelin Brauer, a few years earlier, and he thought the yin and yang of real and virtual lives would make for good storytelling. e 94-minute documentary contains three main story lines. e first focuses on a mini guild from Fort Wayne, Indiana, that includes a seasoned WoW player and his wife, along with three neighbors who each devote 20 to 50 hours a week playing WoW. ey are part of a larger group who work together at a cell phone company, live in close proximity to one another, and log untold hours on WoW. e second story follows a couple who met virtually while slaying dragons in EverQuest II, fell in love, afterward traveled many miles to meet in real life, and then moved in together. e third story introduces viewers to an MMO addict who lost just about everything in real life when he neglected reality for fan- tasy and played MMOs 16 hours a day. e crew spent a good deal of time film- ing the subjects at their respective locales. However, Escoriaza wanted to be sure that the concept of a dual existence—the per- son and the alter ego—was apparent. "I wanted to mash the real and vir- tual worlds in a way that you could co- hesively understand them. I wanted to show the players literally turning into someone else when they were online, and then turning back when they exited the game," he explains. Achieving that visual link required using game footage, mixing the CGI with the live action. For the actual game footage ac- quisition, the group used Fraps, a free uni- versal Windows application for real-time video and screen capture. e imagery was then imported directly into Adobe After Effects, where Escoriaza and Brauer began adding the various controls, movements, and so forth. But oftentimes the real game footage was, well, a little "constrictive." "e move- ment inside the game is not made for film- ing; it's more about moving around inside a 3D environment," Escoriaza says of the reason behind the alterations. As a result, the team had to go out of the game to create so-called composites from the game footage, using the WoW Model Viewer to animate a loop of game footage on a bluescreen. First, the editors captured a still image inside the game, and then stitched together the stills using Adobe's Photoshop. Next, they imported that material into After Effects, where they mapped the composite with a background of another still image and elements of dif- ferent avatars from the WoW Model View- er. "After we put a background behind [the image], we'd make camera movements, like a pan, tilt, or dolly, to essentially ani- mate these characters and creatively make sequences that were more vibrant than we would have had from just moving around inside the game world," Escoriaza says. According to Escoriaza, three quarters of the game footage was taken from the MMOs, while the remainder was created in the WoW Model Viewer and in After Ef- fects. Yet, even the in-game imagery was ma- nipulated to some extent inside After Effects. "I would go in as an avatar cameraman in the first-person mode and capture a PvP (player versus player) battle, for instance, or an in- timate moment between the avatars. en, later, I added effects to the images to make them feel more real," explains Escoriaza. However, for the EverQuest scenes, all the footage was captured in-game (no blue- screening was done). Players would enter the game as their avatars, and Escoriaza Second Skin follows the real and virtual exploits of Matt Elsworth (shown at right), a devoted WoW player from Fort Wayne, Indiana. To the left is his avatar. January 2009 33 Film n n n n

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