Last month, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice hosted a conference marking the 150th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision, including a re-argument of the case. Fresh from his efforts to conduct mock trials in Second Life, Charlie Nesson came up with the idea of shooting a machinima version of the reargument — essentially the video version of a graphic novel. The idea was to boil the ideas down to their essence and in a format easily accessible to the general public.
AudioCaseFiles agreed to provide professional voice acting for the project, which our videographer, Bernhard Drax, would stitch together with the video.
We ended up not having the time we needed to pull a full argument together, but this is probably just as well, as without lip-synching, dialog-heavy Second Life machinima can be pretty drab.
Above: My avatar (made up of randomized parts) addresses the jury. One of the features of this jury box is that everyone sits in exactly the same position. It probably makes for unanimous decisions.
