Get the podcast of the interview Here or check out the highlights below.

MMOvie Interview
Nate Taylor, Director
Pat Brady, Director of Animation

MIG
Hey guys. I still can’t believe this video was actually made. The reason why I'm so surprised is because the project started as a "wouldn't this be cool concept and eventually gained enough momentum to become a reality. You had a blank piece of paper, how did you come up with the concept for MMOvie.

Nate
Initially we were thinking of doing a single scene. Like a 3-5 minute scene from a longer film to try and hook people in and intrigue them. It seemed harder to get people into a quick short 3 minute scene than it was to do a real theatrical trailer, because it’s so dramatic… and there’s a chance to showcase much more of a story and more epic sweeping shots. You can also cover a lot more ground in a trailer than you can in a linear short story. So we decided on a trailer format and then from there it evolved into a parody trailer. We went through a list of 150 movie scenes we wanted to do and narrowed it down to what we could feasibly accomplish with the time frame and the constraints of the game.

MIG
Let’s start from the beginning, who thought of the name MMOvie.

Pat
I actually thought of that name when we were sitting around brainstorming about what to call this thing. It had so many titles, just in this big list… It finally just occurred to me, we’re taking this game and turning it into every movie we can feasibly think of… It just kind of came together that way.

MIG
What was the hardest part about actually filming the video?

Nate
One of the hardest things was, it was one of the first times any of us have done any Machinima. We’re all relatively accomplished filmmakers, but it was the first time we tried to shoot in the virtual world. So just sort of adjusting to the fact that you’re in a virtual world, rather than a real world… just asking people to walk in a straight line at the same time becomes really hard when you have multiple people patched in from different parts of the country… you’re dealing with latency and not everyone can see where they’re walking. Even just simple tasks in the real world, that if you asked an actor to walk from point-A to point-B it’s relatively easy. In a virtual world, it’s a little harder, plus we were shooting on a PvP server so we had the constant threat of our crew getting attacked and killed at any moment.

MIG
Was there any point in which your entire set got ganked?

Nate
We were pretty fortunate. We even shot a bunch of stuff out in Horde territory. The one thing that happened was we were shooting… ah, where were we? Pat, was it Loch Modan?

Pat
Yeah… We were at the Stout Lager Inn in Loch Modan and I was trying to wrangle people out of there because we had random players running into our shot. I would stand outside an yell, “Hey guys, I’m giving away 5 gold to anyone who comes outside!” Naturally, everyone came outside and then I saw, along the side of the inn, a level 30 undead-rogue. Without thinking I yelled to everyone, “Guys! There’s a Horde!” and the entire cast ran out of their spots, chased this guy down for 10 minutes, and killed him. Our producer was pretty pissed-off and everyone had to go back to one.

Nate
Victor, our producer, is the only one on the project that doesn’t play Warcraft… so he was trying to treat it like a regular shoot and keep everyone in order. He had no idea why the entire cast and crew just cleared the inn to go chasing after some “horde thing.” He didn’t even know what it was… he had a lot of adjusting to get use to with the game. Just learning all the terminology, telling people what zones to go to, and what places to meet at.

MIG
I can see it now, this is the beginning of the Massively Multiplayer Actors Guild.

Nate
The MAG or something?

MIG
Yes, the MAG. So how many hours you guys actually spend capturing video footage?

Nate
I don’t know… To be honest, we really lost track. I think there were 13 capture sessions.

Pat
Yeah, I think that’s about right. We had 13 or 14 capture sessions, with each session lasting five hours or more. I’d say we easily logged over 100 hours this, just in the capture phase.

Nate
It’s tough because we tried to shoot in instances so we could control the environment a little more. So we’d have to send a team in first to clear the instance, kill all the monsters, and then we could set-up for shooting. Just getting everyone onto one continent and then realizing you need everyone on Outland… then you need to travel over there, then you need to log in some Alts… everything took a lot longer than we thought.

AJ
Personally, the thing I thought would take the most amount of time was getting everyone’s costuming right. I thought it was genius, just how close some of the costumes were.

Nate
People kept running back to the bank and pulling out all this junk they had saved up for a rainy day. They’d come out dressed as some lunatic and I’d send them back for something different. It was hard find costumes that worked and looked interesting, because we ended up using a lot of the same characters, in a lot of the same shots. Pat spent a lot of time in Model Viewer building toons to look like people.

Pat
Yeah… that was a really interesting experience… using the Model Viewer program as a virtual studio for the virtual world we’re already filming in. I’d try to dress up the characters the best I could to match their movie counterparts. In on instance, we needed to shoot a character in a very specific costume and we managed to find everything we needed with low-level tailoring abilities. We needed to make this character look like Leonardo DiCaprio, get him in his Titanic-outfit, put him on a boat, and film him.

Nate
I think that toon is still parked on the boat, logged-out. He’s just sailing back-and-forth, back-and-forth. We had to shoot that like twenty times, zoning from one continent to the other to try and get the damn shot right. There was such a short window of actual open sea that was decent.

MIG
How long did it actually take to edit the final cut?

Nate
That would be a good question for Victoria, our intrepid editor. I don’t know how many hours she logged-in on this project, but it was weeks and weeks of work. A lot of times we’d capture footage and realize it wasn’t quite right and we’d have to go back and re-shoot it. Also, a lot of the scenes we shot longer than they appear in the trailer. We’d build a full scene out, like the Terminator 2 scene, where we’d have lot of dialogue back and forth. The whole scene was built-out and she’d cut the scene down, much like you would in a movie, to make it fit the trailer. It was a ton of editing, plus the sound design, mix, and music… I don’t know the final hours, but it was a lot.

MIG
If I’m correct, Victoria is also an avid WoW fan and she has several level 70 characters as well.

Nate
I think she has 3 level 70 toons… she made the tough trek moving from a PvE server to a PvP server.

MIG
What was the most rewarding part of working on the MMOvie project?

Nate
For me, one of the best parts is showing it to people who have never seen Warcraft, and the fact that they get it and can appreciate it. Showing it to a roomful of people who’ve never seen the game, and they get the movie references and they get excited about the project. That’s the big payoff for me.

Pat
For me, I really liked being able to do something this cool with a game I really liked to begin with. I really love it when we show it to people who know the game and seeing how they get it, and all the little jokes… there are lots of little Warcraft references in all the scenes.

Nate
The other thing, a large chunk of our crew said the film finally justified the hundreds and thousands of hours they put into the game.

If you missed it check out the movie all the hype is about Here