Second Life Idol is done! It was exciting to say in the least. I can’t believe how many people live through Second Life.  My group really hard to pull off Second Life Idol and for the most part i think we did good. I guess you always have to expect set backs but we didn’t take into consideration AT ALL what actually happened. So what happened that we didn’t plan for? LAG, scripting going wrong, problems with sound. Why didn’t people tell me they were going to switch to stream?!? How hard is it?!? That’s what made it stressful for ME in the beginning of the show. I had like 15 IMs going with people trying to keep everyone’s stream in order and give it to Benton and make sure he had everyone’s stream in order. Let’s see what else…REASONS WHY PHOENIX WAS EJECTED FROM THE COMPETITION:

1. She had technical difficulties from minute 1

2. It took her 15 minutes to move from her seat to the stage

3. Her lag was ridiculous

4. HER VOICE WAS DOWN…completely

5. 20 minutes passed and we were STILL waiting on her

At one point she asked if she could just sing acapella and I said sure whatever you want to do BUT HER VOICE CHAT WAS DOWN! WTF?! I asked her if she would be offended if we moved on and she DID say yes so I waited on her a little while longer because I felt bad. I did tell her to relog BUT WHAT ELSE WAS SHE GOING TO DO?!!? When she signed back on 5 minutes later… I told her we had to move on and that’s when Christion went off…AGAIN. We did our best trying to fill the silence with the commercials but I mean we did NOT plan for something like that at all. Christion kept saying ya know like this never happens everybody understands technical difficulties blah blah blah. Well in real life do you really think that if an Idol contestant wasn’t ready to go on stage they would STOP A LIVE SHOW to wait on them?!? Doubt it….

We didn’t even get to the dance party. Oh and what was REALLY funny to me is that after the show both Christion and Phoenix stayed at the Music Academy…like really? If you were that displeased why didn’t you just leave? Why make yourself look like an even bigger asshole?

Let’s see we have 8 people signed up to perform right now but 2 people haven’t given me any information as to which songs they’re singing nor have they had any contact with me since they initially told me they wanted to participate sooo i don’t think i’m going to count on them. If they don’t show up 6 is still ok with me.

I’m going out of town today earlier than expected so I had to cancel the meeting with Benton..actually i asked him if we could re-schedule for tomorrow so hopefully that will be ok. He forgot about one of our meetings last week so i think he’ll be ok with me having to change it this week. I would just let the others talk to him but the attendance rate when meeting with Benton for the others has let’s just say….sucked so i don’t really want to rely on them.

Really the only thing we have left to do is advertise more. Any ideas?

Our project management plan has actually changed a bit. We’re no longer having the orchestra metaverse but instead we’re having a DJ. We’re not advertising for other groups events we’re advertising for the events that are happening on Benton’s island. I think that might actually be the only things that have changed.

Haha i made one of those big fake checks to present to the winner. I’m so cheezy but i love it.

I’m really excited about our event. I’m making some of my RL AGGIE friends download SL and get avatars so they can come so we have audience members and see how cool our event is going to be.

In the picture is what our stage area looks like over at the music academy. The stars in left corner is the dance floor the builder over there made for us. It’s really cool because it’s like see through so it looks like water is underneath you. i LOVE IT! The lily pads pathways are all hard so people can walk from the area where they’ll be teleported in at to the stage to the dance area or of course they can fly.

So far this week our group has been focusing on trying to get contestants for Second Life Idol. We all joined groups and sent the invitation to the owner of the group to send out to other people. We also went down the line of some of the people in the groups and sent them the invitation to them individually. The invitation looks like this:

**Are you a great singer or know a great singer?

**Come be a contestant in Second Life Idol!

**Hosted by 5 University of Texas students taking a virtual worlds class learning the true capacity of Second Life**

****Prize is 5000L AND a $10 iTunes gift card****

*When: April 29, 2008

*Time: 6:00 p.m.- 8:00 p.m. SLT

*Where: Music Academy Online (Utwig)

*Why: It’s going to be great fun!

*How to enter: IM Val Moomintoog with your name and we’ll be in touch

****Prize is 5000L AND a $10 iTunes gift card****

**We will have actual judges and the audience will actually vote for who they want as the winner!!

***Hurry and sign-up becuase we only have 10 spots!

***You can perform from the genre of YOUR choice!

Once the people contacted me and said they wanted to compete I sent them this:

Thank you for expressing interest in performing in our Second Life Idol competition!

**The Process**

1. Round one, 10 people will perform one song each at 1:30.

2. The audience will vote for the TOP 3

3. The TOP 3 will advance to the second round where each will perform a 2 minute excerpt from a song.

4. The audience will vote for the WINNER

5. The winner will perform a FULL song.

**********************************

***What you need to do***

1. Prepare a 1 minute and 30 second (1:30) excerpt from a song of your choice to perform in the first round of the competition.

2. In hopes that you will advance to round 2, you will need to prepare a 2 minute excerpt from a different song of your choice to perform in the second round.

3. In hopes that you are the winner, you will need to prepare a full length song of your choice to perform for the finale.

4. IM me with your song choices by Sunday April 20

I will be in contact with you to inform you of performance order

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any time!

P.S.- Your performance must be done LIVE!

Thank you!

So far we have 6 people lined up to sing and we’re looking for 4 more and Benton said he would send out the invitation to his group today. One person contacted me and really wanted to perform but lived in France so the time wasn’t going to work out  for her but she gave me some names of her friends that might be interested and i think two of them are performing. Hopefully we get those last 4 people even if we only got 3 more people it would still be ok. We’re meeting with Benton on Sunday afternoon to put together the stage/seating area. Thursday the 24^th BigWang and Sexymama and maybe Karki are going to be on the Podcast and Benton wanted to know if Joe could possibly be there too? We decided against having the Metaverse Orchestra perform. Instead we’re going to just hire a DJ and get a dance floor and have an after party that way. The whole idea of advertising for the other groups kind of fell through because the only other group that needs to have people come to it without sign-ups is the carnival group and they’re going before us. So instead I came up with the idea of when I contact the contestants about their performance order I’m going to ask them to give me a date of their next performance in Second Life so we can advertise for them and also ask Benton for some dates of performances that are going to go on on the utwig island and advertise for that. So yeah so far everything is going well. I’m excited about this!

Well our group was supposed to meet with Benton today so i signed in to Second life at 2:45 and it wouldn’t let me sign in and it’s now 3:45 and it still won’t let me sign in…needless to say i’m pretty frustrated right now. I’m not frustrated because this will set us behind i can get in touch with Benton almost any day because he’s signed in to second life a lot, i’m frustrated because we had a meeting with him and i just feel like it looks bad even though we couldn’t help it. Hopefully he’ll understand. I don’t understand what’s going on though because

it told me at the sign-In page that something unexpectant went wrong and to check the website but the website says Second life is open..so Idk.

I started building the stage last night on our island, the stairs took the longest but it was fun. I’m building it by going off a picture I found on the internet of the American idol stage in the karaoke revolution game. I also made the invitation to start passing out to people who might be interested in performing. I wanted to give it to Benton today so he could help us but second life decided not to work this afternoon.

BigWang Frog sent a message to Bluewave last night about the orchestra metaverse performing and I haven’t been able to contact her today to see if there was a response but we’ll be in touch probably tomorrow or Sunday. She’s also putting together the “ads” for small breaks in between some of the contestants.

Karki is working on our voting script and all the technical stuff..he knows a lot more than I do about that kind of stuff.

Haven’t seen much of sexymama lately. I asked her if she’d be interested in being the host and I haven’t gotten a response back yet. Grodin didn’t feel comfortable being the host and I don’t either so we figured she’d be good because she doesn’t seem shy at all.

So far I’m pleased with the group and our progress. Hopefully we can get this invitation sent out because I wanted to have our performers finalized next Friday.

I don’t know why i keep forgetting to do this before 5 this is the 2nd time! SORRY! This has been a busy week in Second Life. My group is meeting at 8:30 on monday nights now. We just talked to our third party on thursday during class. He’s going to help us out A LOT. I’m really excited about this project, there’s so much to do but it’s all going to be fun.

I want to build a stage of “circles” if that makes sense….I also want to see if there’s a way to have a video of like colors and sound waves like they do on the real show..i’m not sure if that can be done though…i wouldn’t doubt it though.

Benton seems like a really cool guy and he’s going to be really fun to work with. I’ve already told a lot of my friends in real life to go subscribe to his podcast on itunes and make sure they definitely watch on the 29^th. Hopefully we can help him get some publicity since he’s going to be such a big help to us.

I built the “mock” stage on our island but that’s really not what I want it to look like…I’m picturing something much more contemporary. I’m getting ideas through the Karaoke Revolution game that’s specifically an American idol version. It’s exactly what I’m picturing I just need to figure out how to build it.

As for the actual contestants in our competition…I don’t really care what they sing. I think we should let them choose instead of having themes..it seems like more people would want to participate more if they could sing what they wanted. Speaking of contestants I need to make an invitation to send to Benton that he can pass out to prospective contestants.

Judges= Joe for sure. Sarah?? If you’re interested, you can be the positive, have something nice to say about everybody, similar to paula judge.

I’m going to recommend Grodin be our “ryan seacrest” he seems like he doesn’t have a problem talking in public. I however don’t like speaking in public…I’d rather be behind the scenes.

I can’t put a picture on my blog until Sunday since I’m out of town using a computer that doesn’t have second life on it. I’m sorry this is the 2^nd time this has happened I’m going to start sending myself a reminder.

I started working on the Second Life Logo the other day trying to make it as close to the American Idol one as i could. I’ve been thinking about how to build the stage and i’ve been trying to go off of some of the stages American Idol has put together..those things are intense! I really want to do my best though to make the stage look a lot like the real one though.

I went searching on YouTube also this week to listen to some performers who have put some of their stuff on there. I mentioned last week that i wanted to find somebody kind of with a celebrity persona about to do a guest performance in SL and i think i found them…There was a video on YouTube of two women singing the Reba and Kelly duet “Because of You” it was SO good. The woman that sang Reba’s part sounded a lot like her. It was funny too because they had the exact same dresses on that Kelly and Reba wear in their music video to that song.

Our group is meeting on Monday at 8:30 to talk about some stuff. Joe, if you could maybe show up to talk to us about that Online Music Academy it would probably help us out a lot.

I’ve been thinking about how we’re going to do the prize? I mean the real American Idol gives a a record deal. I personally don’t want to limit the event performers just to people who have never been heard of before. Some performers may already have an agent that books things for them and such. I guess our group will have to come up with something…

I think all the groups have a great and fun project to work on. I’ve been searching for a radio station or television station or something similar in second life to see if they would be interested in broadcasting our event on their station the day of the event. I don’t even know if a television station exist within second life but i know radio stations do.  I don’t know if they exist in second life or not but it would be cool if we found celebrity impersonators to come to our event and  and make a “guest” appearance and give a performance kind of like past american idol contestants do in real life. I forgot the name of that orchestra or instrumental group joe mentioned yesterday in class so i couldn’t check them out. I’m not really sure how to advertise to get the singers to participate yet but i’ve been thinking about how the program should be run. We could do it in rounds. The first round the judges eliminate whoever they don’t like and then the second round the judges eliminate again and cut the number by more than half. By the third round have like 3-6 people and make some voters notecard where the people in the audience can vote on who they like the best and then that person wins.

I wanted to find a horseshoe pit for people to be able to play horseshoes but i could never find anything anywhere. I don’t like editing the terrain. It was kind of difficult to put everything back down after everybody had like completely changed everything that day. I put my buildings on our parcel of land and like the ground came through the floor..it was a little frustrating trying to figure out how to straighten everything out.

I think the assignment we just finished helped a lot by showing us what we’re going to have to take into consideration when working on our final projects. Especially the whole thing of having to hold people’s attention for more than ten minutes. It’s hard to come up with stuff that people are going to want to participate in for a longer amount of time without getting bored with it. The group that did the woods did a good job in designing their parcel but they didn’t have anything for us to do so i felt like we were all just standing around for 15 minutes. Like i said earlier i think the winter wonderland group did the best job because they had the snow balls for the fight that everybody in the class could participate in.  Not to mention they had the cool snow effect too.

My group decided to do a western theme for our part of land. So far i think it looks pretty good…i was in the process of making the saloon when i remembered that i didn’t blog.  I went around to different western islands trying to get ideas on what we could do. Boomtown was pretty much the best one out there that i found anyways. There were several people hanging out there including the owners. I was looking for some stuff to put on our land and thought if i told them what i was doing maybe they’d help..neh he was he going to sale me there jail for 800…i got all 3 of those buildings on our land for a little more than that. Like i said right now i’m doing the saloon and trying to figure out how to put a line dance floor on part of the saloon. I haven’t been able to find one yet but maybe i’ll find one somewhere.  I love doing this kind of stuff…the designing and whatnot of things. My group was supposed to meet in second life thursday night but only me and one other person showed up.

I’m trying to think of ideas for the other building on our land…we have a jail and a saloon..maybe a general store or gun shop or something. I don’t know.  The horses that i put on the island are really cool…you can ride them and make them buck up in the air….i mean they aren’t like anything special but i thought it was still cool. The tumbleweeds also blow in the wind. Something that i’m trying to figure out that i’m not sure i can figure out before tuesday but say that i find a line dancing floor to put in the saloon…how do i play music just in the saloon? is it possible? Just wondering….

When i made my flag i wish i would’ve made it blow more in the wind because it kind of looked a little stiff. The bench for me was kind of difficult…i didn’t really like my bench but i didn’t really know how else to do it because i didn’t want it to look like anybody else’s

I went to an arcade while searching for places to take the class and it was really fun. They had air hockey and skee ball and all kinds of arcade games. I wanted to play air hockey but there was nobody else on the island to play with so i played skee ball instead. I went to SLexchange to buy an air hockey and skeeball tables to put on the island to play with other people. The air hockey table turned out to be a crappy table so i might go buy a good one.