The SOS Campaign status has jumped nearly 2% in the last 24 hours. Thank you to everyone who’s contributed - and we’re getting closer to our goal, but your continued help would be greatly appreciated!

If you have seen any of our productions, you’ll see that we not only bring quality arts and culture to Second Life, we also create and utilize new technologies to expand and evolve the medium.

Below is a very brief summary of each of our main productions from 2008. In addition to supporting more productions of similar caliber for 2009, the SOS Campaign would also help support the Primtings, Shakespeare, and sLiterary sims.

• Feb 28, 2008: In our inaugural live performance of “Hamlet 1-1 Extended,” we presented the first four-island sim performance of a play in SL. Anticipating the large audience, we used a variety of preloading techniques and minimal texturing, but still showed off our trademark visual excellence—with photorealistic skins and sculpted talking faces based on the RL actor’s faces. While there was some debate on whether we should perform the entire play, we stuck with quality over quantity and showed off the scene the best we could. Care was taken in both costume and set design to create the historically-accurate Elizabethan atmosphere you saw live at the SL Globe Theatre stage. In addition, we also established standards for HUD-based multi-lingual subtitle support. (Progamme Booklet.)
• Apr 23, 2008: As part of the Shakespeare 24, international 24 hour celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday in RL, we performed the famous play within a play–”Hamlet 3-2: The Mousetrap.” We managed to rehearse and bring to the virtual stage a cast of nearly twenty actors from around the world to give life to the actor avatars, dressed in historically accurate Elizabethan attire. The performance consulted Shakespeare scholars from around the world to present what Socrates might call “an examined” interpretation of the scene. This was the first ever usage of a recorded period music segment played using SL voice, as “piped” by an avatar. Our continued usage of actor alt’s helped the audience easily find the voice sliders in SL voice to tune into the performance. (Programm Booklet.)
• Jun 20, 2008: We took a break from Hamlet to pursue a non-era specific costumed staged reading series of the full length Twelfth Night, but in bite-sized pieces, presenting roughly a scene per week in the days between June and July. Devoid of “the sound of motion,” the costumed staged reading actors were distinctly grayscale. The performance was done with a moving cast, which sometimes enlisted audience members from the last week; this was the first tag-team performance of a Shakespearean play in the world–in both RL and SL.
• Sept 12, 2008: Continuing our hiatus from the Elizabethan era, we brought to the virtual world a modern science fiction play by a published/performed playwright. One’s A Pawn of Time was our first full-length performance of a one act play. “Seamless advertisements” were woven into the set, where great care was taken to simulate a stereotypically impoverished apartment of a physics grad student’s. The box set, whose dimensions adhered to the stage’s characteristic twin pillars, did not modify the existing elements of the Globe Theatre’s thrust stage. This is one of the first plays on SL where the director controlled the audience view through real time dynamic camera controls.
• Nov 13, 2008: This November production of “Twelfth Night: Act 1” continued our tradition of performing full-length unedited first folio Shakespearean pieces. We decided to take an indefinite hiatus from Hamlet due to the costs and time required to create the many Elizabethan historically-accurate costumes. Twelfth Night was performed without era limitations; fewer custom costumes were created, which allowed for the creation of custom sets for each of Act 1’s five scenes. Memorably, we brought a real storm to the Globe Theatre thrust stage. Special care was taken to make the performance as lag-free as possible: the sets were placed without the usage of rezzors, seamlessly loaded. We continued the usage of real time dynamic camera controls. This was the first play on SL where global lighting was changed for each scene. Programme Booklet.
• Dec 21, 2008: On Winter Solstice, when many actors were safe snoozing in bed or otherwise, on the coldest day of the year, we brought to ice a cast of a baker’s dozen “self-powered” avatars controlled by scripts and bots–who zoomed around on ice skates in Shakespeare on Ice.

All of that was accomplished without the aid of any grants or external support. It is all because of you.

We can’t do this again this year without your continued help. Please donate. Every $L counts, and every dollar counts - to help bring us closer to our SOS “Save our Sims” Campaign goal!

Donations are accepted in either RL or SL currency - please help us raise our SOS Campaign goal, so that we would not have to worry about land tier fees for either 6 months (50% goal) or 1 year (100% goal).