Stranger 109

As machinima continues to grow up, we will see more and more synergistic efforts like the latest music video contest held by Blizzard, NVIDIA and Machinima.com to promote The Ataris new album using World of Warcraft. Blizard and NVIDIA have long understood the promotional value of machinima as an art form, but now the music business is finally seeing the potential as well. The skeptic in me has trouble looking past possible pitfalls that may come with such commercial viability (as I point out in the previous post), but for now I will just be grateful for the opportunity of being exposed to some rather exceptional filmmaking. Today’s spotlight focuses on the winning video from the contest: Sam Pierce’s Frame of Mind that features The Ataris’ “The Cheyenne Line”

The film starts off with footage from the character design screen and then quickly moves into some typical gameplay scenes. Initially I found myself questioning its first place status as the film seemed to make little effort to hide the non-diegetic elements of the game’s complex HUD. Typically one of the biggest challenges to creating machinima is trying to strip away the visual elements of the HUD that make it look like a game instead of a film. WOW, however, makes that easy by providing a hot key that does this. Only after paying closer attention to the narrative as it progresses does the use of the HUD in the beginning start to make sense. Through some skillful editing and adept compositing work, Pierce is able to convey a narrative that plays with the existential notion that lies at the core of every videogame, that there are characters within a game world but there are also simultaneously players outside the game that control those characters. In a clever sequence that involves stripping away the apparatus of the game, the main character (Sedrin) emerges as emancipated from the game. Whether this is a commentary on the way in which game enthralls its players is unclear (and those who have lost friends or family to WOW, you know what I’m talking about), but it offers this as one possible read.

Many people get tripped-up on the music video as an art form because its primary purpose is to boost album sales; therefore, they see it more as a commercial than an expression of art. I have always held that a music video is very much a promotional form, but that does not mean creating a great piece of art is impossible. As such, I think efforts like this are a true testament to what can be accomplished within a commercial form. Pierce’s unique take on the WOW universe may ultimately help The Ataris push albums, but I believe it also demonstrates the creative potential of machinima as an expressive form.