It's interesting - though not surprising - to see the names of those involved in the production.

Yeah I thought so too, particularly in light of the recent Herald piece on the U2 in SL project.

btw, Eric Linden has a "How-to" over on machinima.com and what's interesting (especially if you follow some of the comments on the SL forum) is that Eric recommends using FRAPs ( Link).

Machinima is something that kids have been making for years from their video games, and there were some great offline Sims and Sims Online machinimas made even before anyone knew that what they were making was "machinima".

Now it's the cool thing, and it is indeed the coolest thing on two legs. SL seems to have been the first to really get it media coverage and buzz. I'm thinking this is going to be a great source of new subscriptions and I'm hoping that some enterprising folks start giving us newscasts and serial soap operas to watch and all kinds of stuff -- I find there's a tremendous interest in watching videos in a group in SL.

Not everything you see in that film is actually available as a feature within SL as it stands now, however. The avatars' faces don't move on their own. It was not done by putting a scripted prim on their faces, but some other kind of technique which is now being discussed on the SL forums. Apparently the version of SL where this can be done is still in beta? Read here:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=92824

And here's the quote from the director indicating he didn't use SL technology only, as it is in the current client, but a beta:

"Probably the most unique aspect of this production is its emulation of speech. Linden Lab developers created a beta version of Second Life that enabled me to map Quick Time movies onto avatar face meshes. This was done to examine the validity and potential of visemes (facial positions that articulate certain sounds in speech). I used AfterEffects to composite DV footage of moving mouths onto character face maps, and rendered them as Quick Time movies. Using the beta tool set, I was able to cleanly map the movies onto the avatars."

The actors didn't act so much as don avatar skins made for them and climb into animations that moved them. They are all human actors, though.

The group Bedazzled contains both Lindens, residents, and apparently even the resident alts of Lindens so it is a special kind of group.

Many newbies got jobs as walk-ons in this movie and were paid -- it was a great entry-level job and they seemed to have a lot of fun though of course having to do re-takes like in any movie.

There's now a section on the Sl website that tells you how to get started making these films.
http://secondlife.com/showcase/machinima.php

As usual, LL hype that doesn't quite tell the whole backstory, but a hella cool thing nonetheless.