Oxhorn’s Tips on Making a Good Movie

One might see an essay on making machinima and think, “well then, this fellow has it all figured out!” But alas, I don't—indeed I have it far from all figured out and am in debt many of my Machinima film making peers for their advice and trouble shooting. “So then,” you may ask, “why should I listen to you?” Well… good point.

Regardless, I get emails every day from people asking for advice on how to make their own movies, and after making a handful of little movies, I've learned a few things that people might find interesting. I suppose that's as good of a reason as any to read on.

On Movie Composition

One important aspect of movie making is the actual composition of the movie. This composition dictates the flow of the film, how coherent it is and encompasses dramatic and comedic timing and stylistic touches. Now, every would-be film maker has his own style, and style is nothing I can write a guide about. There are certain things, however, that one can do in order to make his movie less cumbersome and more appealing to viewers:

Credits

One thing that has always bothered me with these short machinima movies is when film makers start out their film with long-winded and oftentimes quite vain credits. This can take many forms. The first is the more common and consists of some sort of dramatic music accompanied by long, sweeping shots of scenery from a video game with text fading in and out listing every single person who could possibly be credited for helping with the movie.

Now, there is a place for this, and it is at the end. The beginning of the movie is one of the most important parts because it grasps the audience's attention and will convince them either to continue watching or to click the little "x" button in the upper left-hand corner. I have always found that it is best to either jump right in to the actual plot or, if you have an opening title screen at all, to make it very short and containing only information immediately pertinent, like the title of the movie and, maybe, its author. It is incredibly redundant to place credits both at the beginning and end of a film, especially in a little internet movie which is, more often than not, five times as short as a full length feature film.

The second, and more bothersome, is when a movie is made by pretty much one person, and the film maker then decides to list every possible role he could have played and then attribute it to himself. Nothing is really more annoying than to open a movie file and the first thing you see is a long list of "Directed by: Johnny Bloviator. Edited by: Johnny Bloviator. Choreography by: Johnny Bloviator." If you are the only person involved in the making of your film, just simply say, "Made, produced, edited, directed" or whatever else have you "by Johnny Slightly-Bloviating".

Lastly, when the end of the film has arrived and it is time to do the credits, be creative with them. Don't simply have a list of the credits flash by, unless pressed with a time restriction. Also, don't have them drag on slowly for half the length of your actual movie with dramatic music and flashy lights. If it is a comedy, have something funny going on during the credits. If it is a drama, keep the credits short, functional and maintain the mood of the piece. Don't have flashy credits that fly by, and then lightning strikes and the screen blinks a million colors. Keep your credits short and have them contain only what information is necessary. Or, if you have a moody song that captures the mood of the film that you would like to end with, have this play during your credits and end them when the song ends. For my comedies, I like to either have bloopers, or I will make up some silly song, a little skit or some other funny audio file, and match the credits with the length of this file. This sometimes give me credits that would normally be a bit too long, but seeing as how I am adding content to the film with a funny little sketch, and not just playing music, I tend to give myself a pass on my self-imposed credits-length restriction.

Humor

The easiest humor that can be achieved is vulgar humor and humor involving swearing. One of the reasons I made my Inventing Swear Words movies is because I have found that people fall back to swear words when they need a laugh instead of actually coming up with something creative. In addition, swear words have become so prevalent in our language that you can hear them a dozen times in a steady stream of dialogue from the average person. I think that this is completely unnecessary and weakens the foundation of our language. Instead, I think it is much more creative and funny to make up swear words or use other euphemisms in their place. It is far too common and way too easy to just have a character say, "Aw f*** it" instead of, “Well pluck my feathers and call me a guinea pig!”. And we don't want to be like everyone else now, do we?

People define vulgarity a number of different ways, and my definition will surely be different from yours. So instead of going down the list of humor I find vulgar, I'll just say that using vulgarity in order to elicit laughter is easy and cheap. It is much harder—and infinitely more entertaining—to elicit such laughs using circumstances, dialogue and whatever else have you. This is the sort of humor that will stay with people. Crass movies about drunken binges with men peeing in parking lots, doing practical jokes on the unsuspecting and finding loose floozies to score with abound. They come out, people go to them and laugh, and when they leave the theater they are forgotten. But what are the sorts of comedies that we remember? The Princess Bride. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Even comedies that are classics and contain vulgarity at times, such as Monty Python or Office Space, would have fallen off the face of the earth if not for the things that truly make them funny, such as witty quips, hilarious dialogue and ridiculous circumstances.

Humor is its own strange beast, but it is similar to drama in this respect: the story of a comedy must be consistent within itself and all plot elements must be explained. Monty Python is famous for being rather abrupt. But they were only abrupt because they felt that the best parts of a good gag were in the middle, and that conclusions usually ruined the joke—thus they left many jokes without conclusions. Surely this is legitimate reasoning, but it is also possible to make a good comedy with a strong and funny conclusion, and the mark of a good story-teller is his ability to keep the movie from flopping at the end. Everything must have a reason. If the whole point of the plot is to obtain the Fantastic Gelatin Mold of Grumpyland, the audience must be told why this gelatin mold is so fantastic, and why it is being held in Grumpyland. We must also refrain, whenever possible, from just inexplicably throwing into our story some funny gag which disrupts the flow of the story and has no reason for happening other than that it is funny, because this suddenly makes it unfunny.

Drama

There are certain dramatic storylines that have been used over and over again. It isn't necessarily bad to use these tired storylines, and I have seen many great machinima movies that have used old stories and done them well, pumping new life into them. My Racing the Grimtotem, for instance, was hardly a unique plot—in the end it was a "woman gets killed, man seeks revenge" story. But even when one uses a story that is tired, it can be reinvented in a way that suddenly fills it with life. In Racing I decided to make it a silent movie, shot completely in sepia tone and film grain. I also went into great detail explaining the relationship between the characters and built up a reason for Lanalee's death before simply having her killed. Racing is far from the greatest machinima drama, but it has been popular to some degree because the first half of the movie is a love and survival story, not a revenge flick.

Here are plots that are old and tired:

1) Man is in love with a woman but for some reason dies. He comes back as an undead member of the Forsaken and now has to deal with his love in some way.

2) For some unexplained reason a man's love interest is killed by some thugs and so the man goes on a murderous rampage.

3) The classic love tragedy: Men A and B love woman C and fight for her.

4) The hero is the prince, king, or regent of a land, and his land is besieged by the Alliance, Horde or a tribe of evil murlocs, and so he must rally his troops in order to defend their lands.

5) A boy lives his life as a peasant and then, through a series of interesting coincidences, realizes he is really heir to the kingdom or whatever, just in time to lead his nation against the Great Evil that threatens it.

6) Any combination of these plots or any others with the motive for heroism being a woman.

And the list could go on and on. Now, it's not bad to use any of these plots if it is done right, but if these plots are done, there are things that must be addressed or else it simply becomes another movie to be shelved with all the others like it:

1) Villains must always have a motive. You cannot have some bad guy do a dastardly deed for no reason whatsoever, or simply because he is "evil". Tell us why he is evil, what event in his life made him evil, what lucrative possibility has tempted his greed in order to make him evil, etc. Or perhaps the villain isn't evil at all and the great tragedy of the plot is that the hero and the villain are both good men who fight each other due to a simple misunderstanding.

2) There should always be conflict within the main character. A hero who is the shining beacon of goodness and justice is downright boring. We want to see a hero who is flawed like all of us and has to fight his own demons.

3) Plot elements must always be explained. They just can't "happen". They need to have a reason. If the hero has a pet kodo that he hops upon in order to save the day, show us where that kodo came from or at least bring him up previously so that we know that the kodo isn't just conveniently there when the hero needs it. The same can be said for a sword, best friend or whatever.

4) That said, we need not overly bog ourselves down with details that don't pertain to the plot. If we have a pet kodo that becomes important later, we don't need to tell the kodo's life story at the beginning of the film (i.e. Busco was found as an orphan on the plains of Mulgore. He was taken as a baby and raised on Tauren milk until he became big and strong. He is the fastest kodo in Azeroth because he has an itch and the best way to scratch it is to run really fast, etc.) Instead, weave the kodo into the story naturally before he is actually needed during the climax.

Conclusion

There are a number of conventions for making a good story, and elitists in the field will say that these conventions must be followed, or else your story is trash. In reality, however, this is not true, and though conventions are good to know and often good to follow, and author can make a perfectly good, powerful and enjoyable story by ignoring a few rules. The advice I’ve put in this little essay are steps that I try to follow when I make my own stories, and they are thoughts I have had upon watching other movies, but they are not hard-fast rules at all. So sit down, write a script, bounce it off a few friends and get some feedback, and hopefully my little essay will help!

Oxhorn