Learning more about machinima

In my quest to find out more how things are done on Second Life, I attended In Kenzo's meeting on machinima last night. I had a lot of trouble in the afternoon trying to find Amo Island. The Second Life search engines drive me crazy. I know something's there, but I never seem to hit the right search terms - and yes, I'm a librarian, so that's disturbing! - or perhaps the search engine is just flakey at times. It can't be ME, can it?? A message to SLED (the Second Life educators discussion list) indicated that the magic trick: Use the "map" button and then type in AMO - though I'm sure I'd tried that earlier in the day. Anyway... I did manage to make it to the location! and it was worth the trouble! I read some of the posters about machinima. Once more avatars arrived, In got a Skypecast going - and of course I mixed up the numbers at the end of my Skype ID since I don't use it very often and had to go look THAT up - and she proceeded gave us a lot of information in the space of an hour or so. We were encouraged to just go ahead and try recording some of the session. I was somewhat flummoxed by the inability to note if the Second Life onboard camera was off or on and managed to get NOTHING while we were in session, but went back later and managed to get a little clip of no merit, but it worked! And Windows Media Player was happy to bring up the resulting AVI file and play it! Ok!! ( P.S. One piece of info that seemed particularly useful: During filming, save the movie onto an external device.) Of course I don't have all the necessary tools - no editing software - and I gather that it would be nice if a copy of Camtesia would fall off a truck onto my computer - and and and - (sigh) - but I can see that you can do SOMETHING fairly easily even if it's not going to be the snazziest production on the block.