'Spell is out

Independent film outfit Strange Company have released their feature-length machinima movie, the "punk fantasy" BloodSpell.

My opinions on the film are necessarily messy. I'm an advocate of the medium (machinima is shooting movies within virtual worlds, often using video games), and a friend of the creators - indeed, I worked on one of the tools used to create the film. So I'm unfairly biased. I'm also not a great person to have on your side, because I don't let such things mellow my criticisms or get me hyped - at best I do faint praise, and damn you.

BloodSpell hits a huge range of highs and lows. Almost every aspect - story, performance, cinematography, art, technology/effects, pacing, dialogue - has parts that are truly great, and parts that are pretty poor. (The exception is the audio: sound and soundtrack are good throughout.) A spread of quality is not unusual in a film, but the range is particularly wide here. There are many genius moments and scenes. There are many embarassing ones.

The film is strong at start and end, weak in the middle. This is partly due to the order of shooting: Strange Company learned heaps about their machinima technologies and about movie-making as they created the piece; originally released in episodic chunks, they returned to completely redo the opening scene when editing together this version. It's also partly due to happenstance - the second scene was already strong, whilst the film serves as an archetypal illustration of the cinema textbook tendency to have the story sag in the middle.

This is by a fair way the best machinima feature film I've seen. The dated technology is necessarily distracting, but didn't spoil my enjoyment. Whilst previous machinima movies have excited me about the future potential of the medium, this one is real, now. It simply works as a decent movie in it's own right - I'd watch it through if it came on TV the right midweek evening, probably whilst bestowing it the odd sarcastic aside because, you know, it's lucky to be on the channel I'm indulging.

It's also probably the best budget independent film of its genre (epic action fantasy drama with nods to comedy and contemporary culture - the one word summary is "Buffy".) This is almost by definition: you simply can't shoot real film (or TV) of this flavor for the few thousand pounds it took to make BloodSpell. (Also this genre of film is not blessed with many success stories. This one can only have helped.)

The film was made by volunteers, is licensed under a BY-NC Creative Commons licence, and you can download or stream it for free. I'd even encourage fans of the genre to do so if it didn't contradict my disclaimer at the start!