![]() Now that's an important distinction to make - a lot of people say, "Oh you won that movie contest." Well technically there wasn't a first place, there were five winners, and they weren't differentiated from each other. And we kind of pioneered using techniques like modelviewer/mapviewer to really get shots that had people going "Whoa, how did you do that?" We finished it all up and we put it online and we were like "Well, that was fun, nothing's ever going to come of that."Īnd it was probably a couple weeks later that we got an email from Paul Della Bitta, who was the Community Manager at the time - I get an email, and it's saying congratulations, you're one of the winners. We had cheats to be able to re-map a dual analog joystick into mouse input into the game, so we were able to control the camera in WoW using analog joysticks, which gave us really smooth camera motion. We spent a few weeks on a bunch of tools - fortunately our tech support background kind of fueled our ability to innovate some ideas. So we had a pretty elaborate one, that we built up and integrated with World of Warcraft and Stromgarde and all these things and he was like, "Dude! This is going to write itself - we just have to make our character stories into a movie." At first I was like "Okay, what's the point of doing that dude, I've never heard of machinima, there's going to be guys out there that are going to kick us nine ways till Sunday - why would we even try to fight against something we have no chance of succeeding at?" And he said "Let's just do it to tell our story." And I could get on board with that. We enjoyed writing stories about our characters. We mostly, we didn't roleplay per se all the time, it's just that we had character stories that we wrote. So he came to me saying "Hey, why don't we take our characters," because we were kind of roleplayers - on a PvP server which is a different story - but we always had our character's stories. So we'd been in a troupe, we made a lot of movies together. ![]() ![]() I'd been making really really dumb movies since I was fifteen, with a VHS camcorder passed down from my grandfather - my grandfather had a 1982 RCA Newvicon video camera that we inherited and that started us making movies when I was in middle school. So you guys actually had a background in video besides just the machinima aspect of it. ![]() And he says "Dude, it's this contest where you make a machinima!" and I looked at him and I said "What's a machinima?" We actually hadn't made any game movies ever - we always made more Saturday Night Live sketch comedy troupe stuff, we'd been doing movie production videos, video production, and all kinds of stuff for probably ten years already at that time. That's a long story! In 2005, I was working at Atari as a technical writer, and my friend Ezra and I had been playing World of Warcraft since it had come out - it was about nine months after WoW had launched - and he comes to me at work because we were both working there together, and he says, "Hey dude, have you seen what Blizzard is putting on a movie contest at BlizzCon?" And I'm like, what's BlizzCon? (laughs) Like I didn't even know what it was yet. You actually got your start with a machinima called Return - care to fill us in on that? ![]()
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