Machinima

I was doubtful of the possibilities available to us to make a movie, using a video game, before I watched some of the machinimas. Than I realized that making a machinima is actually really similar to making a real movie. There are characters, settings, camera angles, and scripts involved. I watched "My Second Life", which was basically this guy who physically went into the game Second Life, and found that he could recreate himself to be whoever he wanted. I also watched "Secret Lives", which reminded me of like a television series. And all the drama in it surprised me. They could portray all the emotions that a person could have in real life. The characters can express themselves in accordance to what they are saying.

By using the features available in the game, we, as low budget students, can actually have a bigger variety of options available to us. We can find settings that we otherwise would have a hard time locating in real life, and use characters of any kind of physique and race and stature to make the characters in our mind come to life. We aren't restricted by what we look like, and we don't need a crazy amount of money to build sets and costumes. They are all available to us in the game. We can control the camera angles by moving our avatars around. The camera angles are a lot more than what we ourselves could do with a real camera. One thing that does throw me off is how awkward some of the characters move and how unnatural they look when they are talking sometimes. But it's still pretty impressive what one could do with machinima.

I also scanned through a few of the screenplays, including the ones for "The Producers", and "Forrest Gump". Forrest Gump is one of my fav. movies of all time, so it was really interesting looking at the familiar lines, but with more movements that we don't pay much attention to during the movie, but we see. It was interesting how even the camera angles and smallest movements are included. My ideas for my machinima is possibly a continuation of what happens after the book, or maybe a remix of Little Brother with some other series, like Harry Potter. Oh, or maybe the characters in a gameshow like jeopardy or something. I'm not sure yet. There's a lot of ideas running around in my head.