Machinima In The Cantina

The Guardian Gamesblog has a post up with snippets from an interview with SWG fixture Javier, the mastermind behind the Cantina Crawl Machinima series. These short films feature Entertainers dancing and grooving to music, shot within SWG and edited by Javier. From the article: "Q: What are the unique benefits and drawbacks of making machinima in an online game? A: The benefits, I think, are the flip side of the same coin as the drawbacks. It's all about the other people playing the game. When you shoot a video in an online game, other people actually participate, and sometimes on a large scale. The resulting video is very special to those folks. They can also bring their own unique personalities and actions to the process, much in the way real actors do. The drawback is that, like with real actors, people are often unpredictable, and perhaps even more so in a game which they pay to play."

Comments

Re:Machinima

[Travelsonic]

As a machinima movie maker myself, this is not accurate enouh. You film in-game, butall the actors know that they are in it usually, and also know what to do as well. And Machinima for the post part is a volenteer thing, there probably are some paid actor groups, but usually they work for free because they have an idea and want to make something out of it.

Re:Machinima

[The Evil Couch]

I've been working with Machinima for about 2 years now. Generally, people are happy to help. I haven't heard of anyone asking to be paid. In most games, you can find people looking to do something different. While the game might be incredibly fun, there's almost always a monotony that they're willing to break by trying something new.

I got my start doing Machinima in Planetside. The response that I got from the community was really impressive. I could give people about a week's notice and have a turnout of 10-20 people just from my server willing to help me with a film project.

Sometimes it was really hard to express what I wanted them to do and there is always the inevitable people that will screw off and not really pay attention, as well as those that have no idea that there's filming going on and ruin the fun by playing the game the "right" way.

However, all in all, I've had a very rewarding experience. In fact, in Planetside, I ended up deleting my character and switching sides (this was before you could have characters on multiple factions. it was really painful to delete a fairly high level character and restart as a newbie) to get into a clan that had been helping me a lot. To this day, I'm still an active member in that clan, although I've stopped playing Planetside awhile ago.

Film is a very expressive form and Machinima is no different. There are humorous series, like those done by the Rooster Teeth bunch, there are extremely artsy works like those that won the Make Something Unreal Contest Machinima catagory, there are music videos and there are even video memorials for players that have passed away in real life. Machinima is a lot of fun and a lot of work. While the goal is always to create something visual and compelling, along the way, you immerse yourself with the community and make something as equally important as a good film; friendships.

I appologize if that came off really sappy, but I've had Machinima films succeed and I've had them fail, but regardless of the outcome of a project, I couldn't have gotten as far as I did with it without the help of many other people.