Screenplays and Machinima

A few of the screenplays I looked at were Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Rocky, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Wizard of Oz. What I liked the most about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Rocky were the detailed descriptions. In the Wizard of Oz it would say directions like “Dorothy looks down at Toto, she talks to Toto, then she looks up.” In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind there was an in depth description about the characters—what the look like, the mood they are in, where they are. Also, the locations were described in great detail. Not only was the backdrop explained, but the film extras were also described. In Rocky, Sylvester Stallone didn’t go into as much detail, but there was still a pretty strong description of the scene before it even begins. This struck me as important, because it makes the job of creating the film a little simpler. You do not have to worry about the specifics of where the character is when you are filming because you have already decided when you wrote the screenplay.
There were several “codes” that I did not understand. “EXT” was one and “OV” was another. Also, there were numbers every so often on both sides of the script. I was unsure, but I thought it might have something to do with camera shots—signaling a change in angle/frame.
I saw a few different styles of Machinima. My favorite was a mashup between South Park and World of Warcraft. There were around four or five of them. In them, they showed the virtual world with the South Park characters’ voices on top of the World of Warcraft characters. It was a sort of frame story because it would come back to the South Park world occasionally, for example if one of their parents walked in. In one of the episodes, it was making fun of these type of virtual world gamers. It showed Cartman, Kyle, Kenny, and Stan getting really into the World of Warcraft game and as time passed they became extremely obese and they were covered in zits. On top of this was an upbeat music, signaling the parody of the episode.
I also saw an episode where a guy recorded his friends talking, then tried to play it on top of a Video game. The only thing was that his friends weren’t aware of the video recorder, so they weren’t trying to speak in a way that would aid the success of his machinima. It was stupid. The video game characters weren’t even matching up with his friends’ voices.
My idea for a machinima would be from the perspective of the Severe Haircut Lady. It wouldn’t be like the one with saw in class, where her dad’s abuse drove her into becoming who she was. I want to take a sympathetic look at her, but from a different angle. She and her dad will have a great relationship from the time she was a kid, and he is a DHS worker. He inspires her to protect her country, and to always remember to look outside the typical definitions of “terrorists.” And speed through the book and see what the X-Net Generation would look like from her perspective, not knowing Marcus’ honest intentions.