Sunday, August 16, 2009

The Mobile Phone

Finally a new release! I had originally planned to finish this item a lot sooner, but unfortunately real life commitments got in the way and Second Life was put on hold. However, today, I'm very proud to announce that 'The Mobile Phone' is now available for purchase.

I originally made a vintage phone for my 'Burger Vision Belt', but afterwards I started thinking it deserved an accessory of its own. So I turned it into a backpack, with lots of add-ons referencing phones and technology. On the backpack you'll find: giant phone, battery, duct tape, baggies, fountain pen, ink pot, address book, vintage answering machine, 'speakerphone', electric cords and more. (This process will keep me busy forever. Now I can't seem to part with the battery and already got an idea of what to do with it.)

The Mobile Phone is no mod/copy/no transfer and contains a scripted resize menu. The first color I made was pink, but I quickly decided I (of course) needed traditional red and black as well. In the end I did 5 colors total, which turned out to be a bit of a texture nightmare.

Anyways, here it is! Sales poster :)


And here are the rest of the colors: pink, purple, blue and black. I was kind of hoping I would like the crazy colors better, but personally I do prefer the red version. I'm curious to know which color others will choose.


I'm adding plenty of detail pics to this post, but I can't do this for every color obviously. On Xstreet you'll find similar images of all available colors :)


Big battery, attached with duct tape. I was determined to make a detailed texture regardless of whether you'd see a lot of it. I modeled the battery after a Duracell one, but everything on it is in fact a parody. I replaced some symbols with the kanji for love, changed the warnings to 'do not eat', put 'made in SL' instead of 'made in EC' and changed the name. If you'd pull back the duct tape, you would see the brand is in fact Rezzacell. (A bit uninspired maybe. I wanted to do Avacell, but apparently this exists :P)


Baggies on the backpack belt. I especially like how the lighting on the buckles turned out. The bottom bag contains a small ink pot and the top bag my pride and joy of this whole project: my fountain pen. I love fountain pens. Years ago I was forced to write with fountain pens in school because of the erasable ink, but I'd still use them either way. They're much more graceful and usually more nicely decorated than your regular ballpoint pen.


Close up. I love the pen point. I made the texture from scratch, mapping out the lines and putting a little 'AMH' at the bottom. Originally I was going to do funky colors for the pen as well, but I thought a more elegant version would balance out the backpack.


The belt buckles. I hope I managed to make the colors on each backpack work together. I wanted bright and cheery colors for this item, starting with the phones and belts, but everything else that came on later made the color scheme a bit more complicated.


Address book. The pages inside are even 'printed', but you can't see much of it unfortunately. And yes, that is my handwriting :P


An answering machine, sort of. While looking for inspiration I found pics of enormously bulky 'telephone answering equipment', which made me nostalgic. And I hardly ever do realistic or modern looking sculpts, so this is partly my own design, partly inspired by old answering machines and cassette players/recorders.


Final piece. A megaphone/speakerphone. The one on the black backpack (shown here) is more traditionally colored than the rest. I know an answering machine is rather all-in-one, but the addition of the 'speaker' is meant to be cheeky of course :D


Just a note about the scripted resize: the biggest size is insanely big and the smallest insanely small. The pic below shows me in a child shape standing next to the XXL size. And I'm wearing the S size, not even XS, so this backpack should be ok for any child avatar. I never made my products specifically for child avatars, but I can see why my accessories would appeal to this group. I'll definitely continue taking this into account with future releases. I was very mindful of size differences between prims with this backpack.



That's it pretty much ^^

As you can see from the poster The Mobile Phone is priced at L$380 per color. This is no doubt the product I've put the most time and effort into, so it's definitely worth it I think. There's a fatpack available as well, containing all 5 colors, for L$950. The Mobile Phone is now available in all of my stores and on Xstreet.

Mainstore Location
Summer Store Location

The Mobile Phone on Xstreet: pink | purple | blue | red| black | fatpack


One final note: I announced the winners of my store opening contest ages ago, through my update group. However, I forgot to do it here. Those winners were: Dahlia Seoung, Fidella Faulds and Keira Maertens. I'd sent each of them a monetary prize, but they are now receiving this backpack as well.

2 comments:

▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓ said...

I hope your use of the Second Life logo complies with the Branding Center instructions!

Beyond that, THIS IS GENIUS! GENIUS!

Anya Yalin said...

Ack, I didn't believe that'd be a problem. I was thinking of copyright law and how it allows for parody as a form of fair use, but I guess that's not the same as trademark law.

But if you look at the battery, it says 'made in SL', below which I put the logo. In that regard the logo is a mere illustration.

I went through the guidelines now, but I'm not really sure my use falls outside of them. If it's truly a problem, I'll of course remove the logo. But I don't see the harm really, and I'm kind of dreading having to retexture, rebox and take new pictures :s