Second Skin is one of those documentaries that will have immense appeal all those who share a common bond with its subjects, in this case obsessive players of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. But the film also succeeds in illuminating the phenomenon of virtual worlds for the uninitiated. I talked with director Juan Carlos Pieiro Escoriaza and producers Peter Schieffelin Brauer and Victor M. Pieiro III after Friday’s premiere about the film’s balance, the precision of machinima, and binging on World of WarCraft as “research.” Read a full review of the film here.

Second Skin Interview

Kevin Buist: Obviously, there is a built in audience, but what was the original idea, what was the seed of the idea to first want to make it?

Juan Carlos Pieiro Escoriaza: Well, I guess we started with one of Victor’s teacher friends. He was playing Star Wars Galaxies. He got really deep and into it. And he got Victor the game and then we started playing together. And two months in, we were like, all right, well, cool, that’s it. And he just went, whoosh like a jet into it.

Then after that, he was going on lunch breaks back to his house to play a little, this and that. He was about to get married, and we just saw this really crazy dynamic of being this mayor in a [virtual] town of 300 people, and then trying to live this life, where he is trying to get married in the real world. And that balancing act, how difficult it really became for him. And so from there, it then went on…

Peter Schieffelin Brauer: Yeah. I read an article in the New York Times, called Ogre to Slay Outsource to the Chinese. All about gold farming separately from their friend, and when they told me the story of their friend, I came back with the gold farming, and we were like, this is so rich. Let’s research it. We did about three months of really in depth research. Read a lot. I played World of WarCraft really hard for a month and a half; they did a lot of research.

Kevin: [laughs]

Peter: Yeah, doing a certain type of research.

Kevin: You can write that off in your taxes, I think.

[laughter]

Peter: I am going to try to. After that, we were like this is like a no-brainer. This is really interesting, and we saw there is an opening in the market. So let’s make it, and let’s make it as fast as we can.

Juan Carlos: I thought also, what was pretty interesting was when we went to go make this movie; we noticed that there were like three or four movies that just hadn’t been able to get off the ground. I think it is a testament of how difficult it is to make a movie about gamers, because of their lives, because a lot of time is spent inside and in front of computers. You have to really try to make it alive.

Kevin: Yeah, visually. I think that the two ways that that succeeded for me in this film was, for one thing, you had these animated graphics of statistics. Like when that guy admits that he plays 11 hours a day, and you break down how many hours a week, or how many hours a year, those things, just like the music or the sound effects were killer. But then, of course, there is the game, ingame movies, in Machinima. So tell me about that. How did you get those produced?

Peter: Well, we actually had a lot of help on the Machinima. I made a fair amount of it. I started making a lot of it, but in the end we had the Dead Workers Party, made a lot of those opening Machinimas that are really spectacular, and really dynamic. So Eric Fullerton, thank you very much for that. You did a great job.

Joe Potter did all the stuff in Second Life. He did a fantastic job. He turned it around, like amazingly fast. We had a lot of trouble with Second Life, because it is a very complicated game to make Machinima with.

And all the stuff in EverQuest II, some of it was furnished by Sony Online. Some of their animators made some of it. They were just extremely generous with us, but then Juan and I would go on with our subjects, sit there and work with them, and they were very patient and understanding that Machinima is a serious process and it takes patience and precision.

Victor M. Pieiro III: What was new about it too was the idea of filming a documentary half inside a virtual world. So you are going in there with a virtual camera, documenting things. We started approaching it, at first as a documentary, we would just walk through the world, looking for those interesting interactions, taking a little bit of that, and then a lot of that.

It was too difficult to take that kind of thing, in a virtual world. So they started creating around it. So it is really a melding of documentary footage inside a virtual world. And footage that we had to animate and create around it.

Juan Carlos: And the last thing to add to that is, I was sitting there, and it was really difficult to try to make it come to life in a way, in the same way that the real world was. We were watching Firefly, the series, and I was looking at the way that they did all of their special effects.

And it was always like this shaky camera, kind of like a handheld. I was like, we need to make this a handheld experience inside the game. That’s the way it is going to be real. From that you will be able to discern that the reality of the virtual world, for the actual gamers themselves, is that real.

Kevin: Yeah, wow. That was incredible. I hadn’t picked up how that was operating. But I think that’s really true. The other thing I really admire about this film is that it’s truly divisive. It is like a divisive issue, and it seems like you guys went headlong into that, especially with how this affects families, and children and relationships.

Tell me about keeping that balance, of getting excited about the game, and then not wanting to condemn the game.

Victor: I think the best way we can put it with that, is what we really tried to do was as best as any documentary filmmaker can do. As we tried to focus our camera on seven different people for a year, and try to not touch it as much as possible.

When it came out, it was amazingly even handed, and I have to say, it really had very little to do with us. It had to do with us watching these people for a year, and saying, there are certain aspects of certain characters’ lives, that are really getting destroyed by these games. But for a lot of these characters’ lives, their lives are enriched by these games.

It is a thing very powerful in that they are building these communities and they have this identity, the ability to jump into these games and be whoever they want to be. It is very empowering. People can be into a lot of things, that’s what we saw, and one of those things is virtual worlds.

Peter: Let me just add to that. To reach that balance, there was one other element that was really important, and that’s this guy Juan Carlos, the film’s director. He did a fantastic job and he worked incredibly hard, and we tried very, very hard to make a balance, whereby someone can come in here and come out with a decision one way or the other, really.

We wanted the people to be really deeply informed. I think Juan did a fantastic job, and it was a real struggle throughout, because I must say, a lot of the earlier edits rung a lot more negative. I think that it was a real struggle to bring out the positive.

Because, especially in our society, the way news works, people just pick up on the negative so much more. Just like a touch of negative can… It is something like, one rotten apple spoils the bunch. We really had to deal with that in an effective way, and Juan did a great job of finding that balance and making people see both sides.

Juan Carlos: I thought what’s pretty cool was even after the screening just now, two girls came up to me, and one of them goes, ‘I loved the movie. I thought it was really positive. I was really excited’. The other one, near tears, looks at me and says, ‘I can’t believe you did this. I don’t want anyone to see this. It hurts me personally’.

I sat there and I looked at it and I said, two best friends, both girls, both gamers and here they are, and both of them had completely different experiences. That’s exactly what we wanted to happen. You want people to be able to form their own opinion of what it was. You don’t want to be able to say it yourself. You want people to be able to come away with it.

Kevin: I feel that tension. I loved this movie. I want to show it to all my friends, especially all my friends that I play World of WarCraft with. But I don’t want my wife to see it. [laughter] Actually, which is like, so maybe that’s that conflict.

So thank you, guys. This was a great conversation, great movie.