Theres a Bat on my Hustle from America

Now that My Broadband is back, I have been better able to coordinate our efforts. In short we're back to running rather than crawling at a limp snails pace. As we come ever nearer to releasing Bouncers I look at some of the changes that have happened over the last few years in action and Kung-fu films. Ofcourse long gone are the days when Arnie would run around looking for his daughter, shooting up loadsa doods in the process. Whats more it seems certain people didn't realise times had changed, and they actually put money into films such as 'Collateral Damage'. More significant is the change of comic book movies, which slowly went from being absolute jokes (Captain America, The Flash, etc) to highly popular films such as Blade, X-Men, and ofcourse, Spider-Man. However it's not until I saw Batman Begins that I saw that studios have finally realised that you have to treat your audience with respect. They have finally realised the depth and complexity of many comic super heros, rather than assuming Comic book fans to be simple minded dimebars. Another plus was seeing Kungfu Hustle, which is the funniest film I've seen in the cinema (and possibly ever), ofcourse, also with some great action.

What does this have to do with Bouncers you say?
Well Bouncers is an action comedy with super heros in it. It's proving extremely difficut to mould a cool story to go along with many of the themes of the movie, but it is extremely cool. The more we work on this project the more excited I get. In adition to that I recently watched Team America (yes, I knw it came out a while ago) and it's suprising how Trey Parker and Matt Stone seem to deliberately present themseleves as underdogs with the way they do their films, always choosing less popular methods to make their films (simple looking animation in South Park, string puppets for team America, and their regular live-action films have a very indie feel). It's always encouraging to see their stuff when I'm working cause it reminds me that Machinima can succeed inspite of it's visual simplicity compared to other established mass media. What gets me down, is again, the state of the Machinima community. It seems a bit like a shitty phone company right now, looking to attract lots of new customers, while forgeting about existing ones. It seems like the message board is full of noobs, with very few oldboys there to answer their questions. It's definately become less and less appealing for me.

In addition Crustar, creator of Rick Jones has left the Machinima comunnity due to the way things have turned out in there. I could type all night about what I think is wrong with the munnity in the way it is run, but no, that would be pointless. What is important is that in order to succeed, we have to try and appeall far outside the Machinima circuit. As I said on their forums that site seems to be loosing it's ability to help certain artists.

The prospect of commercialsation in Machinima becomes more significant as mainstream acknowledgement becomes higher priority. In theory these things should be good for Machinima on the whole, but sometimes it doesnt seem so.