500 Word Machinima Discussion

I watched 9 of the machinimas on Lionhead.com and got some great ideas to incorporate into my own machinima that I will make as a spin off of Little Brother. The 9 machinima films that I watched and got some inspiration from were: Every Christmas to 2005, The Invasion, Don’t Cy, HUMANS, No Dusk No Dawn, Our Secret, Appollion, St. Patrick’s Day, and The Mafia. The Screenplays that I looked at were for The Godfather and Slumdog Millionare. It was really amazing to look at what those hit films looked like on paper. Having seen them both, I could visualize them as I read through parts of the script. The machinima short films gave me a better sense of what this genre of film making was like. In class on Tuesday, we looked a camera angles (how they are shot specifically) and how long scenes should last in a 4 minute movie, much like these. While watching the each of the nine films, I paid more attention to the story lines to get a better sense of what I would like to put into my Little Brother machinima film. The film I saw in class on Tuesday was a spin off of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the video game. The only element I feel like I need to use from that is the weapons and police. Some of the machinima films moved to different settings all throughout the film which was nice to see, it gave the film some variety. A film about aliens gave me an idea about metamorphosis. I don’t know how exactly I would accomplish something like that in a machinima film, but they way they did it was having a close up of an avatar and quickly changing shots within a split of a second to the face of an alien and the panning out to show that only the head of the avatar had turned into an alien. In the film HUMANS, robots were taking over the world, essentially. A robot was coming to purchase a human as a pet from a jail-looking setting. The storyline in the film “Our Secret” was very well done. I felt like it could be made into a short cartoon or a show. It used many of the aspects of making films that we talked about in class including how to use light and shadow, when is the best time to shoot (sunset/sunrise), and fade outs to black and the end of every major scene. Lastly, the machinima film St. Patrick’s Day was, I think, a spin of off the feature film “Die Another Day.” Some of the titles for these films were very clever. The scripts of the screenplays for The Godfather and Slumdog Millionaire gave me a better idea of what my screenplay should look like as I am writing it. Having seen both movies, it was fascinating to see what they looked like on paper. In any case, looking at all these machinima films, I have gathered a couple of ideas that I would like to put into my own machinima film based off of Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother.” I want to use this portion of the plot in the film use my imagination to do the rest: the story behind Marcus’s first capture by the DHS all the way to when he is captured the second time, and is water-boarded before Barbara Stratford and the CHP broke into Gitmo-by-the-bay. I think using island shots would be best here as I am panning into video showing where Marcus is being held. The rest of the plot “fluff” in between, I will ignore. I will include only the major parts of the plot “fluff” in between that are vital to understanding why something happened further on in the film. I want to create a spin off the 3-4 year old film “Miami Vice.” The plot, action, and thematic elements I think mesh really well with the atmosphere I want to create in my machinima featuring a portion of the plot of “Little Brother.” Another idea I have is to feature the lives of Marcus and Darryl, the best of friends, before the book began. They will be the two main characters in the Miami Vice film up to the terrorist attack, captured and re-captured by the DHS and Severe Haircut Lady, and they will devise a plan to stay hidden on the Xnet for as long as they possibly can as they try to take down the DHS.