HomeStation Presents: Periselene, A LOOT Space Apartment Film
“In my dreams, both our hearts still beat.”
HomeStation Magazine doesn’t specialize in machinima. We’ve made occasional forays into it, and we have some very talented filmmakers on the team, but it’s not what we’re primarily known for.
What HSM is known for, though, is depth.
We’re usually not the first to report on a hot topic or a new release. This internet culture we live in has trained everyone that the brass ring of community relevance and significance is to be first, FIRST, FIRST! First to cut and paste a new announcement! First to post a new virtual tour! First to be the center of attention!
Sorry, but I don’t buy that. Never have. Never will.
Hence the edict that was handed down to all HomeStation filmmakers: if you’re going to make a movie, hit someone in their emotions. We may not be first on the scene, but by God, we’re the ones who will leave a lasting impression.
So now we come to the LOOT Space Apartment.
NorseGamer and Beta76 at Sony Pictures Plaza
It’s amazing, isn’t it? Easily the most advanced personal estate available in Home. It’s so far beyond anything else in Home that it honestly feels like it came from somewhere in Home’s future. Back when it was previewed in September to HSM, PSTalent and GamerIndepth, I can quite clearly remember sitting in LOOT’s production offices and saying aloud, “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Amongst the pantheon of third-party developers creating content for Home, the trinity atop the summit are Lockwood, nDreams and now LOOT. At the beginning of 2011, I might not have ranked LOOT so highly; though they produce fantastic content, they didn’t have a “statement” commodity that truly upped the ante for everyone else. Now, however, LOOT is unleashing one hit after another, and doing a superlative job of creating commodities and services which deepen the social experience of Home.
The Space Apartment, in particular, moved me to do something I’ve never tried before: create a machinima.
Not a virtual tour, mind you. There are plenty of those already floating around the internet, some of which are quite good. But they’re all very technical. Run around the space, click on everything, wave to the camera. And race to get it online first.
Hey, I get it. And it’s a valuable service provided to the community.
Here’s the thing, though: I’ll wager there are a lot of people who want to see something a bit deeper than that.
Think about a car commercial. Most of them are eminently forgettable. A few are catchy or memorable in some way. But every so often, one grabs you by the emotions and simply won’t let go. Rewatch the famous VW Cabrio ad with Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” playing in the background. It really doesn’t showcase the car that much at all. And yet it’s one of the most memorable car ads ever made.
Because here’s the truth: you don’t remember the rollercoaster. You remember the ride. You don’t remember the playground. You remember the slide. You don’t remember the house. You remember the home.
So, when it came time to showcase the LOOT Space Apartment, we decided to tell a story.
Hence the film you’re about to watch. Periselene.
It’s not a virtual tour of the Space Apartment. It is, however, a showcase for it. More than that, though, it’s also an attempt by HomeStation to provide a form of machinima to the Home community which, insofar as I can see, is severely lacking: dramatic storytelling.
I make no claim to being a competent filmmaker. DIRECTOR_ON_DUTY, HearItWow, Alinea3 and others can run circles around my feeble skills. I’m famously technologically inept (just ask Cubehouse), and even if you handed me all the best editing tools money could buy, I still wouldn’t measure up to their efforts.
That said, the one thing we’re decent at with HSM is hitting emotions.
Periselene is a deeply personal film. Some of you reading this know more of the context behind it than others, but the gist of it is that it’s a story of a man who loves a woman so much that he sacrifices everything to win her back, and rips time and space itself apart to do it. It doesn’t feel like a traditional Home machinima.
How do I hope it will be received?
Well, I think some people are going to cry.
And if I’ve done my job right, a lot of people are going to rewatch it. Because all of us — all of us, dammit — have someone that we care about so deeply that nothing else matters. Embrace that loved one and cherish him or her. Savor every second of it. Because it’s those connections we make, one person to another, that make this life worth living.
A warm mahalo nui loa to the LOOT team for providing such a fantastic setting. And to you, for enjoying this film.
December 29th, 2011 by NorseGamer | 14 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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Awwwww This is so touching. I figured I knew what it was going to be about and then I saw you mentioning your dead wife and then I wasn’t sure, but now I think you were being figurative. This is touching and it is a well done machinma movie. The music is so perfect and really sets the mood and yes, it brought a few tears to my eyes. I’m a sucker for love stories and love seeing true love and that’s what this video shows me. Well done again and I’m so happy for you both!
The film’s not a perfect one-to-one correlation for real life; in the story, this man lost his wife (with only the vaguest intimation as to how, as well as the context behind it), and transferred his essence into a machine body in order to cheat death and spend many lifetimes perfecting a method of finding her again. It’s sort of a tip of the hat to some classic Matsumoto Leiji stories, like Galaxy Express 999.
Thanks for the kind words! We’re really hoping people are moved by this piece.
Ahhhh I see. Very well done indeed, especially for your 1st machinima. Yall are awesome! I look forward to seeing more videos from you, but you have already set the bar quite high for yourself now. If you ever need an extra actress let me know. Thank you again for sharing this as I was definitely moved by this very heart-warming piece. *snif*
Nice Vid! I’m currently getting a crew together to do my own machinima. It’s actually a script that I’ve been sitting on for quite sometime now. I asked the Director if he wanted to take a look at it and he laughed at me haha. He’s currently sitting on a stack of scripts from his own contacts.
Wow, well done! very touching! it’s great to see HOME being used for moving stories like this. I thought of Solaris when watching it. Great!!
Thanks! Solaris (both the novel and the films) was very much on my mind during the creation of this film. Like The Fountain or Moon, certain stories just leave an indelible impact, and you find yourself riffing on certain themes or visuals when putting together your own work.
Epic! Please don’t short sell my praise or write it of as biased. I know and love you both. That said, I loved the video as well. I want to say so much about it but instead I shall only say “epic” and hope that word will some how express all I want to say!
Great job, loved the sad sweet story. There are a few tricks you still have to learn about this new venture you are undertaking but BRAVO on your first try!
Well done norse. I also took a step in the direction of hearbreak storytelling years ago when I first delved into machinma. It was called “A Home Story” and was told through a series of photographs. It is perhaps still to this day my favorite of the machinimas I’ve done.
Personally… I think Home lacks the emote set to tell compelling stories, that’s why most of the machinima that has been on the silly or humorous side.
It’s really difficult to pull a deep emotional reaction out of someone with a Home machinima; in conventional filmmaking, you at least have the emotional reactions of the actors to work with. The greatest challenge of filmmaking in virtual reality, I think, is that by its very nature there’s a certain soulless quality to it.
(This, by the way, is why my avatar always wears sunglasses. The eyes are the window to the soul, and I’ve just never been able to quite get the eyes right on my avatar.)
I completely agree with you that this is probably why Home machinima doesn’t have a lot of dramatic storytelling. And this is why we had to try. There were certain technical tricks used to boost the emotional response — step-printing a couple of shots, liberal use of subtitles, blurring dissolves instead of hard cuts, shots framed in specific ways, etc. — but it’s not easy to pull off.
A real-world friend of mine who’s seen it responded, “Oh, you’re doing Crusade’s Path of Sorrows.” Which kinda brought me up short, because I hadn’t even realized that I was borrowing techniques from my favorite Crusade episode. But, hey, go with what works.
Where this film hits me personally is the warp-tunnel sequence. Not too many Home films break the fourth wall by showing real-world photographs, and it just adds something emotionally which is very intense. It gives Periselene a very different feel than any other Home machinima I’ve ever seen.
That video simply blew me away.. the soundtrack (Coldplay) fits like a glove, it’s direction & Storyline.. It’s definitely going to make me work harder on my video..
Well done, and yes (blush) you guys look great together..
The Cheekster likes!
omg hun, that was wonderful! WOW….ok, you have me on the end of the bed crying. pffft. never sell your directing abilities short, love. that was beyond words. just magical, haunting and beautiful in its nature. and yes, you two DO look gorgeous together. WOO HOO!! ‘gets out kleenex box and blows nose again’
That’s very good. I don’t know what machinima is well I did look it up so maybe I have an idea but the short movie is fun and emotional.
In it’s own why, I guess I liked it as much as Metropolis and Gone With The Wind (really).
That was a great work of machinima Norse! Great story too. It has the wheels turning for me.