Minecraft, The Sims, And The Future Of Filmmaking

The thing is, this basically suffers the same problems. It's not so much technical shortcomings (although the sound desperately needs work...but I'm a sound guy so I would say that). It's just that special effects, ultra-violence, money shots, and showdowns are not the backbone of a movie. Now, the eye-candy stuff is the most expensive in production terms on a real movie, and trailers are always full of eye candy because a) you want to catch people's attention and b) you need to sketch the story very quickly and pictures are the most efficient way of doing that. But the backbone of the story is the relationship between the characters that you care about, and you can't ever get to know characters enough to care about them if they're just walking around turned up to 11 all the time.

Look at South Park - visually speaking it looks terrible, the character design and animation is about as basic as it can possibly get. But it's involving because the characters act out their personalities in a consistent enough way that the audience can identify with them by mentally modeling their behavior. South Park sin't to everyone's taste of course, but you can think of lots of other examples, I just picked this one to point out that the visuals are the least important element. The surprise in a storytelling reveal comes from discovering that a character is not who you thought she was, or or from having a resolution between two conflicting elements within the same character.

The reason that tragedies are tragic is because there are many things you like about the lead and it's painful to see them lost because of the lead's poor moral choices and eventual downfall. Likewise the enjoyment in seeing a hero's triumph is in watching them transcend their weaknesses. Rocky wouldn't be a success if it was just 90 minutes of Sylvester Stallone boxing to victory. the film seems like it's about boxing, but it isn't. It's about a dead-end guy who wants love and self-respect. Only his girlfriend knows what his real goal is, because she's the only person he's able to be completely honest with.

The problem with Deathknights in Love is that nobody in this story seems to have any life outside of Being Epic, whether they're Casting Epic Spells, Fighting Epic Battles, or Making Epic Whoopie. I can't relate to them because they're not real people, they're WoW avatars. I think Valve's Team Fortress & source toolkit are a far more fruitful tool for Machinima because the characters are more cartoonish and have clearly delineated strengths and weaknesses, so while none of the related Machinima is Shakespeare there is plenty of scope for comedy. The relative lack of realism makes it easier to focus on the dramatic elements rather than the purely visual ones (camera moves, impressive entrances and poses, special effects etc.). I think this was also a key aspect of Red v. Blue's success - it's much easier to transcend production quality constraints with humor.

I work on a lot of low-budget films, many of which are dreadful - and what makes them bad is not the lack of production value (sets costumes, cinematography, FX etc. etc.) but the lack of life in the characters, who are usually so bad that the actors and crew hold the fictional characters in complete contempt; at least if the characters are ridiculous the film has a chance to be tongue-in-cheek funny, but often they're just awful. This is the opposite of the film school problem where the characters tend to be richly textured wonderful people (because the writers and directors want everyone to know how interesting and pleasant they are), but there's not much budget or time for production value so you get a lot of films where Nothing Happens and the nice people who live in the world of the film are never put under sufficient stress to make for an interesting story.

With Machinima, the temptation is to use the computer for all that stuff that would be impossibly expensive to do otherwise. And I don't blame anyone for wanting to do something that looks epic, because while comedy is easier to stage it's harder to write, and if you want to be dramatic then awkward/comic stuff lets the air out of the balloon and can actually be depressing. But the strength of epic stories comes from the character development and that ultimately means characters have to overcome their natural tendencies in pursuit of something else. I would be much more interested in (and forgiving of) the Deathknight story if started out with a character that was actually fearful and whose sole interest was in escape, survival, and relief from being someone else's target all the time. That's a situation where good and evil start to actually matter, and courage has to be found rather than just being a character trait for the people on screen to measure each others' bad-assery. Apocalypto is a good film exploration of this theme, not least because it has so little dialog and all the action is motivated by the lead characters need to escape.

Alternatively, I'd be intersted in a story where I find out why the villian is so bent on exterminating everyone else. It's not Because He's Evil; nobody goes through life doubling down on the belief that they're a bad person, people do evil things because they believe they're superior and that people who get in their way are obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of some worth (by the villain's standards) goal. A villain that just wants everyone dead doesn't have anything much to struggle for; even if s/he's a sadist, then there needs to be a struggle against boredom. If the villain completely succeeded in taking over the world and eliminating all opposition, what would s/he do then? Villains are either fleeing fears or pursuing goals just like heroes; when a plot revolves around Good vs Evil it's usually a sign that the story is basically Zombies vs. Zombies. Even in such a situation, audiences still want o pick a side; so the Alien vs. Predator movies succeed as action movies because we can anthropomorphize the Predator character more easily than the Xenomorph. If it was, I dunno, Aliens vx. Giant Spiders or Terminator vs. Predator (or any plot where both sides are intent on the destruction of the other and have little or no instinct for self-preservation) then it isn't that interesting to watch any more because questions of success or failure become so abstract as to be meaningless.

In short, I need a reason to care for characters other than their merely wearing metaphorical white hats or being the first people to appear on the screen before the Villains.

This medium works pretty well for comedy, are there sites/channels for such stuff ?

Fascinating work. I wish I could do this.