Peopling the virtual world

Ariella Furman took her first summer vacation as a college graduate to Walt Disney World, where reality hides behind princesses.

When it was over, she returned to Ivyland, Bucks County, and her job making videos - or more accurately, machinimas - for the virtual world Second Life, where reality hides behind avatars.

Furman, 21, is among a growing number of people who earn very real money in this real-time Web community. An increasing number of corporations, organizations, schools, even TV shows are hungry to have a presence on Second Life, to tap its participants for their products and programs.

"To young people, it doesn't seem so far-fetched," Furman says. "My parents, they just don't understand."

They do understand one thing. "This is like my daughter. She has a lot of imagination," says her mother, Asya Furman.

In Second Life and other virtual worlds, "residents" create animated, three-dimensional representations of themselves known as avatars, and objects known as primitives. Nemo can swim easy - Pixar-quality digital animation this isn't. The look, though improving, is still more like the Sims and other computer games.

Avatars can be photo-realistic. They can be winged creatures. Or, as is often the case in Second Life, they can be an idealized version of yourself - bosomy for the flat-chested, muscle-bound for the flabby, robust for the disabled. Residents buy land, rent space, or build their own offices and houses. They dress themselves in fashions they may not have the courage to wear in real life.

And they can start businesses to earn the Second Life currency known as lindens (the world is produced by a company called Linden Lab) and convert them into dollars using an exchange rate that on Monday was 265 lindens to the dollar.

Furman sometimes gets paid in lindens, though she usually wants dollars. She earns an average of $2,000 a month, she says, which she can handle because she lives with her parents. She hopes to see her income grow as the field develops.

Some Second Life businesses, such as avatar clothing, never leave the virtual realm. But Furman's videos are tangible - like the ones she helped produce for IBM.

Furman ended up working on videos within Second Life that advertise the computer giant's software. The video production coordinator got virtual props and hired Second Life actors, residents of the virtual world skilled in making their avatars perform whatever physical movements were needed.

Furman is a cinematographer and works with the coordinator on scripts, positions of the actors in each scene, lighting and angles.

Software turns her monitor's screen into a camera lens that Furman can manipulate; everyone working on a video can talk to one another via computers.

After filming is finished, Furman edits the shots into a formatted video that can be played within Second Life, on a Web site, or in the real world. IBM showed its videos at a conference in Florida this summer.

Other clients want presentations turned into virtual videos to be shown in their Second Life corporate offices. Employees across the country get avatars and then - instead of spending money to fly to a meeting at the real corporate headquarters - everyone gathers in the virtual office to watch the presentation and talk business.

Furman graduated from Temple University in May with a bachelor of fine arts degree in film and media arts. She first learned about Second Life through a new-media class. Later, in a documentary-making class, her project was a 10-minute video on avatar amazons, called Tarna-Ta-Torvis, made within Second Life. (See examples of her work at http://www.ariellafurman.com.)

"I thought it was adventurous for her to make a virtual documentary," says Michelle Parkerson, who taught that course. "More and more of her generation are seeing the computer monitor as just another version of the small screen."

Furman began making videos professionally while still a student. She'd go to class, get home and work, then study much of the night. She never has confused her Second Life with her social life - on the weekends, she goes out with friends.

She's had a fascination with filmmaking as long as she can remember, maybe passed down from her father, Josif, who is, she says, "a home-movie guy."

Though she craves spending all her time making music videos, Furman is confident the road to that dream runs through Second Life. There, she says, she can connect quickly with big clients such as Nestle and Deloitte.

And so, using her avatar's name, Ariella Languish, she goes online in her office/bedroom, white frilly curtains framing her computer equipment, and sets to work.

Furman is online with colleagues from Popcha!, an "NYC-based media technology company making virtual worlds work for you," according to its Web site.

In a computerized interview, the avatar of Popcha!'s founder, Boris Kizelshteyn, says: "In 2006, I realized the Web was evolving into what I call the metaverse. The lessons learned here, the things that are important and valued here, are the things that will be important and valued in the 3-D universe."

Furman, Los Angeles production coordinator K. DaVette See (whose avatar is known as Suzy Yue), and actors are now on a Second Life movie set making a video for a school in Chicago - Flashpoint, the Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, which wants to get its name out to Second Life's audience.

One scene shows a large animated classroom with desks that hold four computer screens. Two avatar actors portray students. Furman and the others watch this in real time on their own screens - wherever they are in the world. They talk to one another over the computer, which is how Furman directs the action.

She tells the actors to take seats at the desks. Furman asks one if she has downloaded an animated gesture that will make the avatars look as if an instructor is explaining something to them.

The actor replies, "All I have is 'ponder,' " so an explaining animation is found online and added to the avatar's repertoire.

The avatars' movements are jerky but eerily lifelike.

Furman's key tool is her joystick, which operates her video-recording software. As she moves the joystick, the angle of the scene changes, zooms in, or goes wide.

"You could say this is a dolly, a crane and a tripod all in one," she says.

During a different shoot, one avatar actor is in Australia, another in Germany. DaVette See, as her avatar Yue, says, "Please, please, your positions from last night."

"Were you able to get a newspaper for Magdelena?" Furman, as Languish, asks Yue.

Negative.

Languish flies around Second Life as her real-world alter ego types and moves the joystick with an otherworldly speed.

Suddenly, a newspaper appears in Magdelena's hands.

"The bottom line is virtual worlds are a new communication media," says Sibley Verbeck, chief executive officer of Electric Sheep Co., a consulting and production firm Furman has worked for as a contractor. And that, he says, means virtual worlds are a viable industry.

It's not just corporations connecting with computer fans. Electric Sheep did a Second Life project with the CBS program CSI: New York, for episodes in which the main character entered the virtual world to track a serial killer.

Furman says she'll work in Second Life and dabble in music videos until she can turn that equation around. Her former teacher thinks she will make her dreams reality.

"I think Ariella is a visionary to watch for," Parkerson says. "She is really trying to push the envelope of what media connote for most of us."

Ariella Furman describes her machinima work at http://go.philly.com/machinimas

EndText