A bit like Meet the Spartans for elves and orcs,
this video is the fun and slickly-produced first 10 minutes of a feature-length movie created entirely in Vivendi/Blizzard’s World of Warcraft; appropriately dubbed MMOvie, it’s a comedic pastiche of popular movie references (Titanic, Terminator, etc.) threaded into a broader storyline tracking the misadventures of three Warcraft characters.
Originally conceived as a viral video to promote a gaming social network, the production was shot on live Warcraft servers, so the filmmakers had to hire high-level players to keep other WoW gamers from wandering into camera shot. With quality video streaming from Ooyala, it’s also a showcase for all the advantages of using WoW as a machinima platform (great locations and visual effects) — along with its limitations. Due to WoW’s limited library of expressive avatar animations, for example, the sheer amount of shrugging in MMOvie is enough to drive you batty.
Now with 10 million subscribers after 3.5 years of growth, the surprise is it’s taken so long for the WoW community to produce a movie with this level of ambition.
So far, the best Warcraft-themed video series is probably The Guild (featured on NTV here and here), which doesn’t actually mention WoW, to avoid copyright issues with Blizzard. By using Warcraft assets throughout, MMOvie‘s creators went another route: “We are covered by a general use license from Blizzard Entertainment,” Executive Producer A.J. Loiacono explained by e-mail. “That enables us to show the video on the Internet, as long as we don’t charge money to view it (pay per view) or distribute it (DVD, movie theaters, etc.)” Still, that doesn’t preclude them from taking donations through the handy button below the screen.
“We checked with our attorney and it doesn’t break the general use license,” said Loiacono, “since anyone can view the video for free, donations are not obligatory, and the intent is for people to fund all of Full Stealth’s projects.” (That’s his production company.) “However, should a cease and desist letter come from Blizzard it would only make the video more popular,” he argued. “Best thing that could happen to us.”
Image credit: mmovie.voig.com.
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