There’s a renaissance of sorts underway for videogames on film. Hollywood continues to fail in at every turn in translating our favorite interactive experiences into movies. But where big-budget efforts fall short, the internet prevails. One of the best, earliest examples: Felicia Day’s MMORPG-centric The Guild web series, which launched on YouTube in 2007. Since then, we’ve been wowed by fan-fueled short film treatments of popular franchises like Portal, Halo, and Call of Duty.
Is it even fair at this point to call these efforts “fan films”? Dan Trachtenberg is an admitted Portal fan, sure, but his work on the Portal: No Escape short film points to some serious talent — enough to land Trachtenberg a deal to develop an original sci-fi pitch for Universal Studios with Fast Five writer Chris Morgan.
Filmmakers who double as gamers are popping up everywhere on the internet, and they’re making things happen for themselves in a big way. A viral sensation can often start on YouTube, alone — a trend that’s teaching Hollywood to recognize that pageviews can eventually equal dollar signs. Colony Pictures’ Jeff Chan, whose 2011 web shorts, Find Makarov and Operation Kingfish, made Call of Duty a reality for fans, thinks it’s all part of the evolving nature of storytelling on film.
“There were a lot of really bad comic book movies when they first started,” Chan said in a recent phone interview. “It was because the people who were directing those comic book movies weren’t people who grew up with that as their creative inspiration.
“Now you have people who grew up reading comic books who’re at the age where they’re directing big movies,” Chan told us. “And now you see a ton of really good comic book movies. I kind of feel the same way about videogame movies. Hopefully within the next five years, some of the people who grew up playing videogames nonstop will have that in their DNA.”
Trachtenberg has a similar attitude, and he cites Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie series as a clear example. “He took his own approach to that material, and he made it cool,” Trachtenberg says. “I think that’s really what videogame adaptations need. It’s not just about loving the material and putting it on the screen, it’s about the sense of how it makes you feel when you play the game. It’s taking what gamers love about the concept or the idea of [a game] and portraying that instead of the semantics.”
Trachtenberg also draws parallels to Rocksteady Studios’ Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. “[They’ve] got great mechanics, exciting gameplay, phenomenal graphics, phenomenal score… [the game] works on every level and also there’s this great story. [A movie adaptation] has to be great on its own, regardless of it being attached to a videogame. The game ideas should be the icing on the cake.”
The Big Budget Dilemma
It all seems so simple when laid out: a personal connection to the source material usually means a better end result. But the reality is considerably more complex, especially when you’re trying to work within the traditional Hollywood system that is required of so many big-budget films.
Actress, writer, producer and nerd icon Felicia Day has a unique perspective, since she’s seen success both in the Hollywood world as well as in web-based filmmaking. “I think, basically, it comes down to economics,” she says.
“[Disney’s 2011 film] Prince of Persia probably had 1,000 people work on that movie at one time or another,” she says. “The scale of making a movie through a studio system, and one that big with that many special effects, I don’t think any of us really understand what goes into [something like that]. How many people, how much money is involved, how complicated it is to make those movies.
“The bigger the investment, the more fear there is,” she continues. “I think when you get to a certain economic level when you’re making film — dollars-per-minute sort of thing — you get way more middle-men, more overseers, and people get way more careful.”
Dan Wang, the creator of the recently released Halo: Helljumper web series, agrees. “The way we’re taught in film school and the way we’re taught how to write features and how Hollywood works is there’s a standardized format they all follow,” he says. “It’s kind of money-hungry at the end of the day, so they make movies that they think will appease everybody.
“In terms of web series, it opens up that venue for a lot of people who don’t have the option of working for Hollywood,” he says. “It allows us to tell our own story. Most of the time, these [web filmmakers] have a big love for the games they’re making movies of, so they end up being a lot more accurate than their Hollywood counterparts.”
Day echoes this sentiment, pointing out that the internet offers a perfect platform for catering to an audience that Hollywood studios might otherwise look at as niche. “When I signed on to do Dragon Age: Redemption, I really wanted to do it because I figured, on a web-series scale, that I could definitely tell a story that didn’t necessarily appeal to every single person,” she says. “I tried to be as broad as possible, but there wasn’t that constant thing where [I was worried about whether] a complete stranger to this world was going to be confused.”
Doing It Yourself
The sort of “outside the system” mentality also makes way for a stronger focus on trying out new ideas. Chan’s Find Makarov was notable not only for its link to Call of Duty, but also for its inventive take on first-person perspective filmmaking.
Makarov captured the spirit of its source material thanks to a custom rig that Chan and his team built for the production.
The rig, which Chan describes as a “GoPro on steroids,” is built around an SI-2K camera, which was also used extensively in Slumdog Millionaire. “It’s like a tiny [high-def] camera the size of a cigarette box,” Chan says. “We engineered this rig to fit on the side of a baseball helmet, counterweighted it on the other side, and ran a cable from the camera to a backpack where all of the [footage would be processed]. This way, it gave the camera operator the ability to run around and move freely.
“At the same time, our camera operator was wearing VR glasses,” he continues. “So you have a rig on the side of the helmet and you’ve got VR glasses to see what the camera’s looking at. It’s very difficult because [the camera operator] has to navigate and move his head according to where the camera lens is, not where his eyes are.”
Of course, as Trachtenberg notes, it’s also not always about translating the literal aspects of a game into film. His Portal: No Escape is, tonally, a considerable departure from the light-hearted dark comedy of Valve’s two first-person puzzlers. No Escape is an experimental narrative, and one that was very well-received by Portal fans. Would a Hollywood treatment have strayed so far from the source? Probably not. Just look at what happened to director David O. Russell, who walked away from the production of an Uncharted film last year after citing creative differences with Sony Pictures.
“I sort of wish that the Uncharted movie (Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune) had come out [with Russell still at the helm],” Trachtenberg says. He admits that the series is unique in that it already works as a blockbuster film, but he contends, however, that Russell’s unique talents could have done something unexpected with the Uncharted franchise, in a way that fans might have embraced in the same manner they fell for his own Portal: No Escape.
“This is the thing about David O. Russell: I don’t know why, but everyone forgot about [his 1999 film] Three Kings,” Trachtenberg says. “Everyone was thinking The Fighter and I Heart Huckabees and whatever. Three Kings is exactly the tone of Uncharted. It’s hilarious and smart and has some cool action scenes. It totally works. I think that [the Uncharted movie] would have been phenomenal. But a part of me did think, ‘Jeez, just do the story that Uncharted was telling.’”
The upside to top-notch videogame-to-film adaptations happening online is that they’re inspiring others to try out new ideas. Wang admits that director Kevin Tancharoen’s work on Mortal Kombat: Rebirth — the dark, violent, and occasionally gory proof-of-concept short film that snowballed into the Mortal Kombat: Legacy web series and the upcoming feature-length Mortal Kombat film — was a big part of the reason why he went after Helljumper.
It’s also important to remember that the barrier to entry is extremely low. “You can get a Mac or a PC and software for a relatively low price; you can get a camera for a low price; you can watch videos online to learn how to light and get a mic; and you can learn After Effects,” Day says.
“If you really decide that you’re going to make a short film, you have all the tools at your fingertips to learn how to do it well,” she says. “I would just say, choose a subject that you love versus something that’s going to please other people. Because of what the internet is, you will find an audience that it will resonate with.”
