Intention

I wanted to retell a story in terms of what it meant to me. I remember when Indie Game: the Movie first came out, I nearly cried towards the end, because it summed up everything I felt about making games. The film was told in the context of three games, one in development, one at the time of publishing, and one after it already came out, but I really latched on to the two developers who spoke about what making games meant to their childhood, so I wanted to retell the story in terms of just that.

Context

I looked at super cuts of clips and movies that were tailored more to the heart of the content rather than "all the words said in the movie in alphabetical order," and thought about what content I could take out of a larger story that mattered to me. At first I thought about meaningful sections of comics, but that's neither video nor audio. Then started cutting together audio to make GLaDOS from Portal seem nice, but as I was scrolling through my files looking for more GLaDOS audio, I happened upon my copy of this movie and the rush of emotion I got looking at just the thumbnail for it made me realize I had to share that feeling instead.

Process

As I said, I didn't start with this project. I started, actually, wanting to take out all appearances of Brendan Fraser's character from the episode, "My Screw Up," from Scrubs, but found that to be difficult, since he's never on screen without the most important character to the story.

I wound up deciding on doing the thing with GLaDOS being nice. It would've worked too, but it wouldn't have been very emotional. I downloaded one video file of GLaDOS moving around and about 40 minutes of audio.

I then moved to Indie Game: the Movie. It wasn't hard for me to pinpoint what about the movie connected with me so emotionally, it was just a matter of getting it all together. I skimmed through the movie, looking at all the personal interviews, and pieced together the clips I thought represented what I loved about the movie.

I used Windows Movie Maker to cut together the clips, and reordered them to make the stories more interspersed with each other.

And here is my finished product:

I've been told my video has been blocked in the United States for copyright issues... since I can't upload the video directly (size), I'm trying vimeo.

Reflection

My inner critic likes this one, actually. Given more time, I'd have liked to make a clearer, more coherent audio track, but overall I think I accomplished what I set out to do.

Attribution

Indie Game: the Movie is a documentary film by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot