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Gamasutra has an excellent write-up and collection of links for the 2008 Machinima Festival. Winner of several prizes was ‘The Monad’ whose creator was interviewed at Popmatters in this feature. Since his work received extensive coverage in that piece, this post is instead going to focus on the other breakout video of the awards: Egils Mednis’s The Ship.
The video contains no dialogue and is 11:18 minutes long. A man and a small boy, fully clothed, trudge through a long icy valley. When they eventually stop after several long minutes of them walking, the pair collapses and sleeps on the ground. Before long, a dull roaring sound awakens the man and boy. The Ship finally reveals itself, an enormous black monolithic structure that encompasses the entire valley and slowly approaches at an equally mind numbing pace. The movie continues on with the agonizingly slow chase of the Ship while the pair, dragged down by their own physical exhaustion, eventually succumb to its inhuman, constant pace. I’ll leave the ending’s surprisingly poignant comment on what this elaborate metaphor represents for those willing to watch the entire video. It’s open to interpretation and yet…not as much as one would expect.
As with other Machinima, the film is remarkable on its own and yet still serves as a prime example of what a director can accomplish without financial inhibition. This is a small project that is visually depicting what would usually cost thousands in animation or live footage. Counting in that you would have to use CGI to create the ship and that the icy valley would be impossible to depict without computers, the video’s sad metaphor and plodding pace would probably not justify the expense of making this video under normal means. Where would you find someone willing to pay for it? Yet with Machinima, such art not only has a place, it is warmly welcomed. Having an artistic medium where a director can achieve whatever he imagines is only half the struggle, having a welcoming audience and means of distribution for that creativity is the other half. I like to think ‘The Ship’ would be praised at any film festival, but at Machinima 2008 the artist walked away with top honors and praise. You can watch it anytime online through the link.
