In what will be a win/win for everyone involved in Second Life, HBO has bought the television rights for My Second Life, a machinima documentary about Molotov Alva, avatar of Douglas Gayeton, an accomplished multimedia director, and they will promote it as an Oscar nominee contender. They will screen it in a Los Angeles theater to meet the Academy’s qualifications and are hoping to premiere it at Sundance, a film festival in the United States that ranks alongside the Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto film festivals for importance.

This is the rare Second Life news that is worthy of full superlatives: it’s the highest profile example of an SL-to-RL rights deal so far, leveraging Linden Lab’s policy in which Residents retain the underlying intellectual property rights to content they create in-world. (It far eclipses Tringo’s SL-to-Nintendo Gameboy deal of a couple years ago.) It’s the first SL machinima to sell to a major TV broadcaster. (Longtime SL auteur Pierce Portocarrero recently landed a well-deserved development deal with NBC on the strength of his Second Life machinima like this one, but to my knowledge, the network didn’t purchase the broadcast rights to Pierce’s existing works.) It’s also the first time SL-based content has landed someone a Hollywood agent, for in the acquisition process, Gayeton secured representation with UTA, among the industry’s “big five” firms, which also counts Johnny Depp, Harrison Ford, and the Coen Brothers as clients. I suspect some non-Second Life superlatives are in order too, though I’m less sure here: it’s probably the biggest Hollywood purchase of a video which first aired on YouTube, and the most prominent distribution deal for a machinima project made in any 3D platform. Source: HBO BUYS U.S. TV RIGHTS TO SECOND LIFE MACHINIMA SERIES, PROMOTES IT AS OSCAR NOMINEE CONTENDER

The author of the New World Notes blog, Wagner James Au, was partly responsible for this series airing on Youtube, as a staffer for Submarine uploaded the first episode to Youtube, upon which Wagner blogged about it on his site. That hit Boing Boing and the rest, as they say is history.

I have posted the first video of My Second Life below.

Episode # 1: My Second Life

Posted to Technology Videos on September 04, 2007

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