Feb 6, 2012
Roll that beautiful game footage!
Canadian filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot recently screened their independent film Indie Game: The Movie to a beaming crowd at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
We first told you about the groundbreaking indie film back in December.
The film was met with great reviews and won the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award.
Swirsky and Pajot took questions from the audience afterwards along with Tommy Refenes the programmer and co-creator of the indie game Super Meat Boy, also featured in the film.
The trio spoke about the similarities between filmmakers and game developers, the untapped stories behind gaming and the benefit of using kickstarter.com.
Watch the video on Pop-Gamer.com
Swirsky starts out talking about how he got the idea for the film, saying, ’The very first thing that lead us to this movie was we did this five minute short on this independent designer Al Holokwa who made Aquaria with Derek Yu… This short was kind of commissioned it was supposed to be five minutes, we had to make it five minutes but it could have easily been twenty.
“It was just this fantastic story about just how hard it was to make this game and how this game became a reflection of himself and we just thought that was really really interesting.”
“Shortly after that we went to the game developers conference in San Francisco and we’re hanging around the independent game summit and met all these other guys Tommy included that had the same story as Alec and we just thought these are fantastic stories and no one is telling them, and no one is talking about video game design in any type of documentary form this is a movie just waiting to be made.”
With a vision in his head, Swirsky wasted no time.
“With that we started asking around and doing a little bit of shooting and just started to make the movie and put it out on Kickstarter. People responded really really really well and that set everything in motion for nearly the next two years”, he said.
Pajot goes on to explain how Kickstarter helped make the film a reality.
“The whole film except for the wonderful music form Jim Guthrie was made by James and I,” she said. “We edited and shot and did it all ourselves and did the interviewing. We used Canon HDD SLRs which if they didn’t exist we wouldn’t have made this movie.”
The audience laughed, but Pajot makes a stern point, saying, “No, It wouldn’t have looked this way. That was a big part of it and we are really lucky technology sort of caught up to what we can do.”
“Kickstarter is a site where you can put a project online and ask people if they want to fund it and be part of it. So we put up this project in may 2010 and we asked for fifteen thousand dollars and we made it in 2 days”, she said smiling.
“Then we put up the project again a year later after we had totally run out of money and people funded it again and we made way over one hundred thousand dollars through kickstarer and all of our savings in the film.” The audience laughed again and Swirky gives her a knowing smile.
James takes the mic again and talks about what’s next.
“We have a couple of follow up projects that we are thinking of and one of them is video game centric”, he said.
“We’re not too sure exactly what we’re going to do next, but we do know that we are just scraping the surface with… independent games never-mind video games in general. There are so many stories to be told completely.”
“Hopefully some of those stories will be told by us… it’s weird that there is not more video game design documentaries because video games are huge they are absolutely massive and they inform our culture and we are not talking about them, we are starting to talk about them more but we’re not talking about them the way that we should…”
Swarsky went on to talk about the startling similarities he uncovered between filmmakers and game developers.
“This is their story but it feels like our story. We could identify with everything because we are two people who use accessibly technology to work on something kind of in a vacuum for a very long time where it was just us a computer and ideas and [game developers] are two people using accessible technology working in a vacuum for a very long time just them and their ideas.”
“It seemed like we were going through what they were going through six months after the fact. We would be editing them in crunch mode crunching to get [the game] ready for Xbox and we were editing in crunch mode to get ready for a festival and it got to this point where we were actually communicating using clips from the film… We were quoting the film to say how we were feeling and it was spot on, it was completely sincere…”
Click below to watch the full Q & A.
