Stranger 109

Music video machinima tends to vary in both technical ability and overall artistic aesthetic. As a first attempt at machinima it can offer an immediate boost in the production value in that the sound will at least be good, assuming your audience digs your song. Then it’s just a matter of cutting together a sequence of shots that works well with the song’s narrative or your interpretation of it. Some go even further and try and sync the words to a character’s mouth, Paul Marino’s I’m Still Seeing Breen is probably the best example to date. And while some rely heavily upon pre-rendered cutscenes because they offer considerably more polished animations, the more initiated tend to stick exclusively to gameplay footage. The Sims 2 offers a user-friendly interface that makes entry level machinima far more inclusive than other game engines; therefore, so much of the music video machinima out there tends to use its engine. This recent rendition of Nine Inch Nails’ Something I Can Never Have

demonstrates some of the more advance techniques I’ve seen using that engine.

Narratively, the film follows the struggles of a twenty-something man coping with the recent death of his father. Usually these sorts of “in memoriam” videos border on the extremely personal and can almost ring a bit cheesily comedic because you don’t know the beloved one. However, Hollow3en (doesn’t offer up his real name) avoids that trap for the most part. It could simply be that this is probably my favorite NIN song, and I am giving it the benefit of the doubt because of the nostalgic throwback to 1989. Regardless, the film makes great use of the free camera movement within the game engine to create some unique moves I had not seen in Sims-based machinima before. There are a number of flashbacks which make use of the color fades to black and white and the blurring effects that are common to Sims machinima, but the use of a craning/rotating camera to show the older character and then spin around back to the same spot to show him as younger reminds me of the same simple technique used by John Sayles in Lone Star. At times the film is a bit on-the-nose with coordinating the images and lyrics: “my favorite dreams of you still wash ashore,” accompanied by a shot of a beach with palm trees. However, the film matches the tone of the song well with both visuals and the narrative which takes a rather tragic turn.