Second Skin, a documentary to be featured later this week in the Spotlight Premieres section at SXSW, follows a handful of gamers who are deeply devoted to Massively Multiplayer Online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. The film premieres on Friday at 9pm at the Austin Convention Center. Check out the trailer above, and answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody, from director Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza, and producers Victor Pineiro and Peter Schieffelin Brauer below. Victor Piniero and I are also speaking on the same SXSW panel, Blogs, Buzz and Buddy Lists, which goes down on Sunday, March 9.

Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.

Juan Carlos: This flick is like An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris. Except that the movie we’ve been making for two years doesn’t involve an environmental crisis. I kept on coming back to An Inconvenient Truth, because online games (MMO’s) have the power to change the landscape of our society. Games like World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and Second Life have and will continue to make our global community closer in ways that I think are just becoming clear now. I’m not trying to imply that it is going to cause problems on the scale of global flooding, but I think it is a societal evolution that we are running to catch up with. Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control on the other hand takes a really intimate look into people’s obsessions. Which is to say that our movie is about people who tend to play a lot of MMO’s. In our film I try to balance between that gigantic cultural phenomenon, and the personal lives of people who are ‘just gamers’. Finding a way to say this movie is about a burgeoning sub-culture AND seven people - is a delicate balance. Suffice to say I think you’ll be pretty surprised where everything ends up.

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