Free Pixel

I recently had the chance to have a look at the final version of Nanoflix’s “Stolen Life”, a professionally produced feature length machinima movie.
For those of you who don’t know about the film and its makers, you can visit the Peter Rasmussen’s blog here and also the official movie website here. The movie was co-produced and directed by Jacqueline Turnure and written and produced by Peter Rasmussen.

Stolen Life is - just like all the other Nanoflix productions - an exceptionally well written movie that exchanges human characters for specialized robots in a setting that is described as “Future Noir” by its director Peter Rasmussen.
It’s a detective story set on a lonely mining asteroid. Our main character, Pi (with “all the digits”), brought to life by the voice of Chris Jones of “Tex Muphy” fame, investigates an incident that led to the shutting down of the robot crew operating the mining facility. The crew is led by a robot voiced by amazing Claudia Black, probably known to quite some people through her involvement in “Farscape”.

Reviewing a film like this in a machinima context is no easy task. While most machinima films rely on punchlines or slapstick, the piece in question here is a full fledged drama/thriller, obviously not without smart dialogue and sharp character quotes. Also, it is one of the very few pieces that is an actual feature length movie and is also published as a feature length movie - no episodes, no small chunks.
Finally, the art direction is very detached from any particular game, and while compelling, nothing revolutionary and probably won’t raise any eyebrows. The team understood the need for coherence and overall concept.

Indeed, it is executed so well that finally we have a film - and i might add that for me personally this is the very first machinima film in that sense - where the tools and production methods are completely out of any value, but lay the groundwork for a truly well written detective story that - without knowledge of the technical details - could also be an independent animated feature film. In other words: this is the first film that crosses the line that seperated machinima from the computer animation world. It is the first film where the fact that it was produced within a game engine is not a feature, but just a logical step of producing this movie.
The achievement of Stolen Life is the fact that reviewers can start concentrating on the story and dramatic structure without the need for context or explanation as to the pros and cons of realtime filmmaking or gaming roots. In that sense, Stolen Life actually is an independent feature animation, and the term machinima with all its connotations attached would not pay tribute to the quality of the film - there’s no need to stress that the audio is extremely well recorded or the music is a real treat, because it just comes with the overall exceptional production quality.

That said, i am sure that there are people that will be less intrigued by the story arc as i was, especially when you’re not a sci-fi or detective story fan. A lot of information remains in a bit of a grey area, a type of storytelling that is very appealing to me but might put off other people. And yes, the visual fidelity might be an issue with some people as well, especially in the outdoor scenes where the lack of lighting and polygon count provides rather poor contrasts, resulting in less interesting image compositions.
In my personal opinion though, the character design - both visually and dramatically - makes up for a all of these minor issues. The combination of the technical and visual characteristics of the individual robots - their shape, functionality and animation - and their personalities - their behavior, their voice and psychological development - is simply outstanding.

What i found especially compelling was the way the small pieces of animation - a rotating arm here, a camera swiveling around there - add to the overall feeling of, well, “feeling” in the characters of the film. Even though all the characters in the movie are electro-mechanical devices, you completely buy their emotional involvement in each other and in the story.
It is a very well written and fascinating movie to watch with lots of nice subtext and a coherent choice of characters, character designs and metaphors. And i hope it leaves its mark as one of the few memorable moments in machinima history that it deserves.