Posts with tag Ollgabopi

The Kodo Egg by Ollgabopi is a fairly short, simple story. It's not complex or overwhelming. Instead, this story is about the dreams of a simple man, and the narrative is just as straight-forward as the character's desires. I won't spoil the shattering ending, of course.

What struck me most about The Kodo Egg is the detail Ollgabopi put into his scenery. When the man crosses a bridge in a muggy forest, the audience can see dozens of those annoying bugs you always find around swampy areas. While panning through another forest scene, Ollgabopi took the time to animate a squirrel scampering up a tree. Details like these are what makes his work feel alive and vibrant, and helps promote a simple story into something awesome.

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Ollgabopi created Project Chaos for the BlizzCon 2009 machinima contest. While he was unable to secure a prize, I till found his video very interesting on a couple different levels. According to Ollgabopi, he only got started on his video very late in the season. Then, he found out that videos had a max duration of 3 minutes to be considered for the contest. He did some editing of the video and submitted it.

The story of Project Chaos is fairly basic. In fact, the story seems largely irrelevent to me. It's there to set a mood and genre. To summarize it very quickly, though, the idea is that this old scientist found himself lonely and unhappy in his old age. He created a daughter for himself. At first, the townspeople assumed the daughter was normal and just like everyone else in the town, but only later discovered some sort of dark malevolence about her.

The technique that makes Project Chaos particularly interesting to me is its broad use of a first-person view through much of the movie. It gives Ollgabopi an opportunity to heighten the suspense with restricted scene views. It also lets him question the sanity of our protagonist, by making everything in the movie open to interpretation.

It's a fun video, and I was happy to see Ollgabopi appear in this year's contest.

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The author of this video, Ollgabopi, was inspired by a Lonely Place skit. He took the audio track from the skit, and presented in a WoW machinima context. Lonely Place has received this treatment before in Boombox. It's not the most complicated technique ever created, but I find that the WoW characters really help bring out the "extra funny" in many of these jokes. This video is titled Normal Guy, which is also the name of the Lonely Place original.

The video is pretty simple. I think that was a wise choice on the author's part, since he really needed to keep the audience's focus on the audio track. Of course, that also keeps the video from showing off his talent, but I imagine that wasn't the goal of Normal Guy.

Ultimately, these bite-sized pieces are fun, but I look forward to seeing Ollgabopi expand into something else.

Click here to check it out yourself.

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As a good friend of mine says, "Oh my god, the cute! It burns!" That might not be the most professional opening to my blurb on today's WoW Moviewatch, but it certainly was what I was thinking the entire time I was watching The Lonely Monster by Ollgabopi.

The animation is smooth and simple; there's no doubt about what each character is feeling. The music is absolutely appropriate, though I don't know if the creator meant for it to be quite that melancholy. The story and presentation is a little bit of a trope, but the overall effect is that much stronger since it draws on what we already know and feel about this situation. A lonely, friendly monster just wants to be accepted. It's not rocket science, and Ollgabopi lets the music and animation support the emotions of the sequence.

I was a little bit disappointed not to have more catharsis at the end, but I think as a piece of stand-alone art "The Lonely Monster" is very strong.

[Via Myndflame]

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

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