News

To get your head around machinima, a form of filmmaking that uses video-game software to tell stories, you need to know about Leeroy Jenkins and Alex Chan.

The latter is a young Parisian designer whose life has been changed by a political film he made using a $50 computer game. He will be in Toronto tonight when his video, The French Democracy, is screened as part of the Worldwide Short Film Festival's focus on machinima, and he has an inspiring story to tell.

But let's begin with Jenkins, a character in a short film that has spread around the Internet like good gossip at a doughnut shop. He is more representative of what machinima has thus far offered the world: game-centred humour, ironic T-shirts and merchandise, and not one but two catchphrases.

The video that made Jenkins a star -- a nerdy geek star, but a star nonetheless -- is set in World of Warcraft, Blizzard's fantasy on-line game that has more than six million subscribers. The creators are in a guild called Pals for Life and the video was a promotional tool to help recruit new members. In the two-minute clip, the players control the characters and the camera just like they do in the game, and there is recorded dialogue that matches the action (hence machinima: machine meets cinema).

According to a rough estimate of the film's viewership since it appeared last year, more than a million World of Warcraft players have already seen it, but here is some play-by-play for everyone else: Armoured knights and cloaked wizards stand in a circle and plan an attack on a nearby hall filled with deadly dragons. Their odds, says one young man asked to do a "number crunch," are "32.33 -- repeating, of course -- percentage of survival." But one member of the group is not involved in the planning and instead sits meditatively just outside the circle. Suddenly, this paladin stands, issues a battle cry -- "Leeeeeeroy Jenkins" -- and charges through the door. His companions are befuddled, but then follow Leeroy into the hall, where they are slaughtered one by one.

The catchphrases are that battle cry -- Leeroy Jenkins now has a Wikipedia entry longer than Canada's, approximately -- and his enigmatic last line: "At least I have chicken."

The T-shirts have sold briskly, naturally, but is any of this worthwhile? It is funny if you have played World of Warcraft -- and especially if, like me, you respect its design but find taking it seriously more than a little silly.

Most machinima works, like Leeroy's adventure, are comments about the games being used to make the films, or more generally about the act of playing video games. And most, to be honest, are inelegant spoofs, but there are sophisticated movies out there, with high production values and valid business models, given the number of people who are familiar with the game worlds.

The series Red vs. Blue, which will have its first episode screened tonight at the Canadian Film Centre's festival, features characters from the Halo games having existential discussions as they wait for the other side to attack. It began in 2003 and now has four complete seasons collected and released on DVD by the growing machinima studio behind it, Rooster Teeth Productions.

Game makers have been watching the trend closely, and last year Peter Molyneux's Lionhead Studios released a PC title called The Movies, which provides novices with a full set of filmmaking tools and an easy system for posting the results on-line. This is the game Alex Chan picked up in a Paris store during last fall's riots in France. The 27-year-old lived in one of the suburbs, La Courneuve, where mostly young men were setting cars on fire and battling police, and he disagreed with the way those events were being covered by the media.

He wanted, he says, "to help people from other places understand how young people can fall into the type of anger that led to the riots."

Chan bought the game and put together a short film about three young men, each of whom had been discriminated against by French authorities in the past. Their anger over these personal injustices leads to their involvement in the collective vandalism.

Chan did his best with the English subtitles, called it The French Democracy and posted it to the Lionhead site. Soon, he was being contacted by the media -- the story appeared in The Washington Post and was widely picked up around the world -- and the video has been watched more than a million times. He is now making another film using the game, this time with the help of a French production firm.

I wrote about The French Democracy when I reviewed The Movies last year, and the film's message has stuck with me. More than any newspaper article or TV news report, it has shaped how I view those events in France -- and it was made by one person, close to the action and the people involved, in seven days using a game.

With machinima, you're going to see a lot of Leeroys at first and they will be good for a giggle and a novelty mug, but Chan's story is a sign of bigger and better things to come.

scolbourne@globeandmail.com