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Mark: It all begins and ends with the story. The thing is that if you're trying to just chase kids, it'll be very transparent and I think that kids are smarter than the studios give them credit for. They'll know they're being pandered to, so ultimately they're going to respond to the characters and the story and when you try to adapt a video game into a movie, sometimes they forget that...they just think they want bells and whistles.

Wade: Yeah, I agree with that. People forget that video games are one medium and movies are another and there is some crossover - video games are telling stories more now and they're weaving the gaming aspects in to the stories more than they ever have before and if you're going to make one of those into a successful film, you need to find a game that has a great story, a great narrative element to it and expand on that! Take that aspect of it and THAT'S what you exploit. Not so much the gaming aspect of it but the narrative aspect of it because a video game has a story, we'll use the story to link the gaming elements together and leave you wanting more story. What better way to get that audience into the movie theatre than to expand on the story?

DO: Develop well-rounded characters

Wade: Character is very important. You want to deepen those characters, you want to give them an additional life, give them a different level to their lives that you can't give them in a video game.

Mark: Right, because there's a sense that people making these 'video game' films are not correctly gauging what it is that a ticket buyer will respond to versus a video game. A video game player will respond to one thing, he will not respond to the same thing if he's seeing a movie, that's a whole different discipline. So you really have to throw away whatever it is that made the video game so great because now you're making a MOVIE...and that's a whole different thing. That's more immersion; you're seeing it on a 50-foot screen. So now you've got to get yourself a great story and great characters and make it immersive. It's just a different discipline and I think that sometimes the studios don't quite seem to understand that it's TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS.

Do: Shoot from different P.O.V.'s

Wade: Enough with the "First Person Shooter" photography, people get that enough in the game. You don't want that necessarily in the movie because the joy of that is controlling the character, you can't control a character in a movie. For some reason, they (filmmakers) thought that that was cool, to replicate that on the big screen...but it isn't.

DON'T: Go overboard with story/character development

Wade: Let's take a HORRIBLE Uwe Boll film like Postal, which I think is EASILY one of the 4 or 5 worst films made in the last 50 years...A HORRENDOUS abortion of a movie. Why? Well, it's a bad movie but it also has NOTHING to do with the game. It's so disconnected from the game that whatever vestiges the game might've had that would lend to the story aren't there. So it completely disconnected itself and wound up being a jumbled mess of ideas with nothing connected other than the title.

Mark: Or if you look at something like the Resident Evil films, there are basically 20 minutes of exposition you couldn't care about followed by 10 minutes of a firefight that is pretty well done, but really you're just biding time till the next zombie fight.

(Me: so basically like a 30-minute cut scene?)

Mark: Yeah, a 30-minute cut scene. That's what filmmakers THINK kids want to see, a bunch of cut scenes strung together and they DON'T. They're coming to the theatre for a different experience.

DON'T: Underestimate your audience

Mark: NO filmmaker should EVER underestimate their audience no matter what genre they're working in. The thing is that it's easy to underestimate kids or underestimate the video game audience because they just think "Oh, they're just kids who sit in front of their TV Saturday night playing video games. How smart can THEY be?" Well, you know what? They're REALLY smart, they know when they're being pandered to, and they know when something is crap, you know? And you can't just give them that.

Wade: I totally agree. There's an unfortunate trend among executives to assume that the audience is stupid, that the audience is always going to be unintelligent and that if you have any material that is remotely intelligent, you need to dumb it down because otherwise people won't get it. I think that making material MORE intelligent and assuming that the audience is smarter than you think they are, THAT'S the way you make great movies. Audiences respond to that, they appreciate when they're given something that makes them work at it a little as opposed to just spoon-feeding them information right up front like most movies do.

DON'T: View your film as a 'Product'

Mark: Let's take a film like TRON. A couple of decades passed between TRON and TRON Legacy, you will NOT get that long tail with Resident Evil. No one's gonna be remaking Resident Evil because they're not memorable films, they're basically 'product'. They're assembly line product. Now you get something like TRON, which is a good film, a memorable film that resonated with a certain audience and it has a very long tail on laserdisc, DVD, in video games and people remember it and they LOVE it. It was groundbreaking and now 28 years later, there's a new one.  All these other video game films are not gonna have that. There's not gonna be another 'Postal', there's not gonna be another 'Resident Evil' because again, it's just assembly line product. They look at it the wrong way.

And finally...

TRON

The Last Starfighter

Grandma's Boy

Wargames

Existenz

Mortal Kombat

Worst VG movies

ALL Uwe Boll (ESPECIALLY 'Postal' and 'Bloodrayne') note: Mark HATES Uwe Boll.

So, what did we learn? Tell a GOOD story with well-rounded characters/elements, know your audience, STOP with the cookie cutter films and shooting from FPS point of view.

...And if your name happens to be Uwe Boll, STOP making films altogether.

I learned a lot today, how about you?

You can catch Wade and Mark's show; Stupid For Movies, LIVE every Thursday at 8pm PST. Tell 'em Crix sent ya.

Class dismissed.

IGN.com

The Digigods' Wade Major (left) and Mark Keizer

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