Following our previous Spotlight on Olibith, we will now investigate one of his fellow highly-talented machinima makers: Baron Soosdon! With dark and moody videos, this gifted Finnish student has won the heart of many World of Warcraft players. He has his own unique style and this interview will help you to discover some of his moviemaking secrets, as well as the importance of working together with other brilliant artists!
Our respects, Baron! Could you please introduce yourself and tell us what made you start making machinimas?
Hello! My machinima artist name is Baron Soosdon and I'm from Finland. I'm graduating quite soon and, after that, I'm going to start looking for a job.
I made my first machinimas around January 2006. It was the Blackwing Lair raid movie, Rite Of Passage by Devlin, that got me started. When I saw that, I wanted to do something similar, so I filmed a movie about a raid to Molten Core. Later on, I switched into real machinima and did my "beginner works" then. Everyone has to start somewhere and you learn by doing. My first actual machinima was a short advertisement called "Twill For The Kill". It was also my first experiment with the WoW model viewer.
There is a feeling that the European machinima scene is no longer a group of isolated individuals but a strongly bound collective of artists, working altogether. Do you agree? How does this collective function? How do you interact with each other in spite of the distances, and how do you manage to collect all contributions in order to integrate them into the final montage?
Yes, I agree. We work together and we work alone, depending on the machinima we are working on. Sometimes we share ideas and samples of our machinimas with each other over the net and discuss them. Mostly we interact via IRC (channel #machinima at Quakenet), instant messengers, and e-mail. Collecting and merging contributions is fairly easy; only the net speeds and storage capacities (even if you compress the files, they might still be quite big) are the limitation. After sending the more-or-less edited file to the machinimaker who needs it, he just needs to add and fit it to his or her own footage.
Sometimes things are a bit simpler - Person A does the actual editing and compositing, while Person B provides characters and a script and/or storyboard. I am quite sure that we will get to see more collaborative works in the future.
The machinima collective can be compared to a comic strip collective where several cartoonists and story writers work together and influence each other. How were your creations influenced by the creations of other machinima makers?
A gnome called Nikita
Who would have thought so small a thing could take so long to model? This “Little Nikita”, a mysterious “hitwoman”, has benefitted from all of PinkHair’s skills in order to be revealed in all her finery in Unlimited Escapism: Volume Zero. Please note that PinkHair also makes his own machinimas of which Warsong Carol is the latest. The Baron is definitely in good company!
I try to avoid the straight copying of ideas as much as I can, but I do like to take influences - interpret the others’ methods and ideas in my own way. When I see something cool or interesting in another machinima, I want to try it out and see if I could do that too in my own style. The WoW machinima community is quite open-minded about sharing ideas and techniques on how we do things.
The visual quality of your creations has impressed players, however some of them believe that aesthetics have been favored over narration. What is your opinion about this? Generally speaking, how do you handle feedback on your work?
That is absolutely true. I have favored and will favor visuals over the story when the movie requires it (for example the Unlimited Escapism series and music videos). But for story-line movies the story and script are always the priority. Feedback is always welcome! Good and bad, opinions help me tweak my works to make them even better. It is impossible to please everyone (I don't even want do that, sometimes quite the opposite). I don't expect everyone to like my machinimas, but I am always interested in hearing why people like or dislike them. Constructive criticism is the thing that every machinimaker needs. Negative feedback has been around so long that it is here to stay but it is nothing to lose your night's sleep over.
What major challenges, in terms of technical, visual or narrative elements, do you face in order to improve your creations?
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One of the biggest challenges is to be your own critic. I think that I have made this scene perfect, but have I? In these situations, I sometimes ask the other machinimakers for help. We show our work to each other just to get feedback and improvement ideas.
Technical issues are mostly about having enough hard drive space or having enough processor power to render the movie in time. For example "Unlimited Escapism vol. 0: Shock Your Senses" took around 28 hours to render. Its project files took about 150 gigabytes of space and the uncompressed final render file of the movie was around 60 gigabytes in size.
Everyone of us machinimakers is sometimes plagued by program crashing. But as Al Lowe (the creator of Leisure Suit Larry games) once said, "Save Early, Save Often".
As for visual effects, it is very much trial and error. First I try to put a set of colorization and/or effects to a scene. Then I see if it looks good and if it fits the overall mood of what is happening. If it is not what I want, then I will tweak it until it's perfect. I learned the hard way that when making a story-line movie, it is a good idea to have everything written and planned before starting the actual editing and filming process. If and when I start working on a bigger plot-line movie, I do want to write and plan it as well as I can.
During the writing process it is easier to think about the technical things too: where do I film this, can I do this with that character's animations, what can and what cannot be presented? WoW has a limited set of talking and emotion expression elements. I do not see that as a bad thing, I see that as a challenge.
Can we have a hint about your next machinima? Will "little Nikita" make a sensational come back?
Unfortunately no, since I do not have one planned currently. Making "Limited Escapism: To Cure A Hangover" (1st place comedy winner in Warcraftmovies.com "The Fabled Few" contest) drained me quite empty on ideas. I'm patiently waiting for the next idea to come out which wants to be made. :)
But, I do have plans for the future which brings me to your next question :) Yes, little Nikita will have her own movie someday in the future. I have written a rough draft for a movie involving her. It is in very early stages - for example Nikita is the only character with a name at this time of writing. I also have some unfinished movies in my hard drive, which I definitely want to continue when I get the ideas perfected...
Thank you for this interview, Baron, we wish you the best for your studies and hope to see many more great machinimas from you in the future!
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