as I live a few more questions: Making Jack Twist in Second Life: A New Possibility for Brokeback Mountain Fanart and Illustrating BBM Fan Fiction.

I've been percolating the idea for some time now to combine my love of Brokeback Mountain slash fiction with my enjoyment of the virtual reality of Second Life (SL). So this weekend I worked on creating a Second Life avatar (i.e. in-world character) based on Jack Twist, as played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

It was actually fairly easy to do (well, OK, maybe not so easy for the average SL newcomer who may still be wandering around bumping into things...estimates are that as many as 90% of people who join SL eventually give up due the steep learning curve). First step was to create a "blank" avatar and outfit him with modifiable (tintable, etc.) skin. Second Step was selecting a suitable full-face "passport photo" of Jake Gyllenhaal from iheartjackmedia.com Then I trotted said avatar over to a place called Avatar Island and went through the (relatively) simple process of creating a "face tattoo" which the blank avatar will wear:

You can preview the created head tattoo in 3D, rotating in order to see all its angels before committing to have it made:

Once we have our face, we need to add realistic-looking cerulean blue eyes, which means a SL shopping trip :-) I picked out this highly photo-realistic pair from Skye Eyes:

Now comes the hardest part: tweaking the innumerable parameters to make the face look more like Jake Gyllenhaal's. This is painstaking work which took me quite some time, and much tweaking of various features, length of nose, width of eyes, etc. etc.:

Now we have our Jake head, which I think compares favourably with the original :-)

Now, stick on some hair and presto! Jake Gyllenhaal, the actor who played Jack Twist in the movie Brokeback Mountain:

But of course, we can't stop there! It's time to shop for some clothing and a black cowboy hat...

Hmm, maybe that hat is a little TOO big. Good thing we can adjust it to fit.

And we follow the same process outlined above for Ennis Del Mar. This avatar still needs some tweaking (I still think that the face is a little too narrow; the avatar looks okay only from certain angles):

But don't stop at clothing, there is the ultimate cowboy necessity: horses. The horses from McLean Ranch in Second Life are the ultimate in realism and animation, so I gifted both Jack and Ennis with stallions. I mean, what good are cowboys without horses?

And I now have "actors" who can (with a little PhotoShopping) "act" out scenes from just about any Brokeback Mountain fantasy you can think of. Jack and Ennis as corporate lawyers? Jack and Ennis as astronauts? Pirates? Priests? Scottish farmers? Any slash fiction you can come up with, can be recreated in 3D. It can be done! Here are a few sample "photos" (note that we can also do video on SL, which is called "machinima").
Ennis and Jack by the Fire, Homewood Island