Machinima

As I watched different machinima videos, I tried to vary the genres of the videos so I could look at how different topics changed the approach to machinima making. I quickly found that most of the videos were very similar and did not have much change in style from genre to genre. I found that the videos that looked the most polished and professional were the ones with multiple camera angles, as we discussed in class, and clean movements and expressions. Most of the time, the videos that weren't as successful had their characters moving around too much or too little and the speech didn't match the characters movements or expressions. The most well executed videos paid attention to small details, such as proportion, and kept things simple. I think in for our class projects, the best plan is too keep the videos as simple as we need to to make them look well executed. If they are too complicated, they may look sloppy, which, in my opinion, isn't a good trade off. Another thing I noticed in viewing the machinima videos is that many of them took advantage of a narrator. I like this because from a production point of view, a narrator makes things easier. Instead of focusing on movement, emotion, and mouth movement, we only have to worry about movement and emotion while filming, then overlay speech later. If used correctly, this is an effective strategy in simplifying the video but not loosing content. I liked when the videos gave perspectives from different characters, but I'm not sure that we could do this successfully because of our lack of previous experience with machinima making and screenplay writing.
For my screenplay, I know I want to take advantage of using a narrator to guide the plot. I also am considering using Marcus' (or some other character's) thoughts as the narration. My ideas so far are:
1) Keep Van in the plot of the story longer. I would have loved to see her being a part of Marcus' Xnet stuff because she was an interesting character. I feel like Doctorow made a mistake cutting her out of his novel just as things were getting exciting.
2) The beach scene where all of the Xneters exchanged public keys was unrealistic. They could have easily been exposed by each other. I think it would be an interesting twist to have the Xneters gathered on the beach exposed by Marcus as the ones responsible in an attempt for him to save himself.