Digital Story: Second Life Newbie Tips

Posted on June 16, 2007 
Filed Under secondlife, sleducationwiki, virtualworlds

Sean and I have been working on a collection of Newbie Tips for users who are new to Second Life. This is an important resource for many of our participants at workshops and presentations in-world, as it takes some users a bit of time and effort to make sense of the Second Life User Interface.

So, in the interest of creating better resources, I’ve finally finished a new collection of slides, which covers more of the important skills, and decided to make a little digital story out of it. Check it out below.

This is an example of one way that Second Life can be used to generate multimedia resources. It’s a little simpler that machinima, but still lots of fun.

The process for making these digi stories is pretty easy:

Step 1. Collect some snapshots in Second Life which illustrate the points you’d like to make in your digital story.

Step 2. Edit the images with your favourite image editing tool. In this case I used Photoshop, but you could also use The Gimp or Picasa.

Step 3. Put together your slide sequence. There are a range of tools you can use for that - I used Photoshop Elements 5 in this case…. But there’s a great list of software for digital story making on the Digitales Wiki which provides some good options. You could even do this with an online tool like Jumpcut! ;)

Step 4. Record your audio and choose some background music. I used the inbuilt tools in Photoshop Elements 5 to record my narration. It was simple and quick and allows me to add new slides later if I want to without too much trouble. However Audacity is a great for recording and mixing your audio too.

Step 5. Compress if you can - I use Sorenson Squeeze to optimize my videos for sharing online. Another great option for compressing videos and digital stories is Super. Compresing is especially important if you also want to use your video on a videoplayer in Second Life, where you will need it in .Mov format and uploaded to a server.

That’s it - digital story complete using Second Life as the platform to generate the raw artwork. ;)

And the great thing is, the assets I’ve created can be used in other ways as well. I’ve uploaded the images I created to Flickr to create a Photoset and Slideshow, and I’ve also dropped those images into a Powerpoint Presentation and uploaded it to Slideshare here. I’ve also uploaded the slides to Second Life, so users can view them at our Virtual Meeting Space. Teleport here to check it out.

Lots of different formats for all sorts of users to access….. Come to think of it, I could even use Super to create a version to send to someone’s mobile phone!

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