Most of us will have seen movies like Scary Movie and Airplane in which the writers seek to make fun of current affairs, political blunders and even other movies. These movies were all bog standard, people-play-people making fun of other people and whilst it's fun every 10 years or so, it becomes old pretty fast especially when you are subjected to the same bad movies and the same bad mick taking.
Machinima is a phenomenon that is sweeping the gaming world and has been doing so for many years. People have made short movies, music videos, PvP live action videos and a host of other videos simply from animations and footage taken from games like Halo and World of Warcraft. Some of the more famous machinima videos out there, such as the infamous Anti-Elf Anthem from Oxhorn have gone on to receive awards for there innovation and originality.
var FO_8 = { movie:"http://dev.curse-gaming.com/static/flash/flvplayer.swf", width:"500", height:"350", majorversion:"7", build:"0", bgcolor:"#FFFFFF", allowfullscreen:"true", flashvars:"file=http://videos.cursebeta.com/stream2/premium/237.flv&autostart=true" }; $("#flvplayer_8").click(function(event) { UFO.create(FO_8, "flvplayer_8"); $(this).unbind('click'); });
Despite the age of machinima and the massive scale it has been done on, machinima really took off with World of Warcraft. Millions of players world wide suddenly started creating machinima videos based in and around World of Warcraft. Boss kills, PvP videos and even, "stories," began to appear all over the internet. Despite this however, nobody hit on the idea of a machinima movie. Well, nobody hit on the idea until VOIG and Full Stealth Films.
Voig.com and Full Stealth Films released today (22/8/2007) a two-minute theatrical trailer based on the hugely popular MMO (massively multiplayer online game), World of Warcraft (WoW). The project, entitled MMOvie, uses the real-time, interactive WoW environment and in-game characters supplemented with out of game models to create a series of parodies of memorable movie scenes. This film-making process, called "Machinima", has been done before on many platforms, including WoW, but MMOvie will be the first full-length theatrical machinima film.
If you watch the movie trailer, you'll notice that it is of the same type of movie as Scary Movie which is why I mentioned the title at the start of the blog. The only difference is, this full length feature film will be made entirely using footage collected from World of Warcraft. In the trailer, we can see such classics as, "A Princess Bride," and, "Terminator 2," being ridiculed in a way that only World of Warcraft could accomplish and with the success of the South Park episode, Blizzard are sure to be itching to see this one come out of production. After all, any publicity is good publicity.
var FO_7 = { movie:"http://dev.curse-gaming.com/static/flash/flvplayer.swf", width:"500", height:"350", majorversion:"7", build:"0", bgcolor:"#FFFFFF", allowfullscreen:"true", flashvars:"file=http://videos.cursebeta.com/stream2/premium/750.flv&autostart=true" }; $("#flvplayer_7").click(function(event) { UFO.create(FO_7, "flvplayer_7"); $(this).unbind('click'); });
The movie is currently being edited together from the footage these guys gained from... you guessed it... filming on a PvP server. Why does everyone do everything fun on PvP servers? As such, the filming was fraught with the exact behaviour you'd expect from PvP nutters.
We were at the Stout Lager Inn in Loch Modan and I was trying to wrangle people out of there because we had random players running into our shot. I would stand outside an yell, “Hey guys, I’m giving away 5 gold to anyone who comes outside!” Naturally, everyone came outside and then I saw, along the side of the inn, a level 30 undead-rogue. Without thinking I yelled to everyone, “Guys! There’s a Horde!” and the entire cast ran out of their spots, chased this guy down for 10 minutes, and killed him.
Apparently, this project took lots of cast members and the crew and cast logged about 100 hours alone just in the capturing phase and the weeks and weeks put in to the final editing phase must have been a nightmare. This project looks set to rock the gaming and movie industry in one sweep, possibly more so than the Warcraft movie being made by Legendary Pictures.
Set for release in March 2008, MMOvie will be a massive hit amongst gamers and none-gamers alike and will prove that MMOGs aren't just good for anti-social behaviour and raiding.
