In May 2006, Legendary Pictures announced that they had acquired the rights from Blizzard Entertainment to make a World of Warcraft movie. There was the sound of enormous rejoicing from gamers around the world and then … a great silence. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in joy and were suddenly silenced. Since then, the silence from Legendary and Blizzard has been fairly deafening. Two years later and still no news on the project. Apparently it’s still in development but they haven’t hired the “someone along the lines of a Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan type” they wanted to direct the project.

With a planned release date of 2009 impossible to meet at this point, why not just scrap the whole thing? They could save themselves the embarrassment of spending over $100 million dollars on a movie that’ll end up tanking at the box office and become a pack-in freebie with the next expansion set. There’s a growing mountain of reasons not to make this movie; take a look at them after the break.

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The phenomenon of massively multiplayer online role-playing games seems like the perfect documentary subject. Collectively, MMORPGs have upwards of 50 million worldwide users and counting. The dilemma in selling a movie like Second Skin is not in finding an audience, the challenge is finding compelling images to put on screen. People don’t normally line up around to block to watch people sit in front of a computer for 12 hours a day.

Based on the audience reaction at Friday night’s premiere, the solution to the visual problem provided by director Juan Carlos Pineiro worked swimmingly. A rock concert atmosphere complete with a standing ovation followed the screening. A deft combination of dramatically animated statistical graphics combined with artfully incorporated machinima give the film a visual punch to match its compelling subject matter.

The film follows the lives of a handful of people immersed in online role-playing games. The recovering addict and his conflicted support councilor, the couple that falls in love in-game, and four best friends whose real lives begin to encroach on their hours of virtual ass-kicking as a top World of WarCraft guild. In between check-ups on the various story lines, interviews with experts in the field, statistical break-downs of the industry, and a visit to a Chinese virtual gold farm round out the film.

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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…

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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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