I’ve really slacked off on my challenge to get through Ben’s Watch List, not really much of an excuse, but I’m going through some upheaval in my personal life right now, and have been spending extra time with my boys this week. Sometimes, they’ll watch machinima with me, they are of course more clue-ed up when it comes to recognising various game engines. I think I’ve probably made it not ‘cool’ for them to get into making machinima. My eldest says it seems like too much hard work and would sooner be playing video games than use them for filmmaking The youngest loves The Movies and has been working on a his ‘blockbuster’ since the game was released. He loses interest and goes back to it every now and then. He’s very sensitive and I don’t expect the movie, if he ever finishes it, will have a public release.

I came across Overman’s Blog today, ( his comments really made my day!) and the mention of ‘chick flicks’ came up. I’ve often thought our films were ‘girlie’, though it’s not intentional, we make films we ourselves would enjoy watching and fun to film. Recently, Matt Kelland referred to our films as ‘unashamedly romantic and soppy’. Funnily enough, a high proportion of the email or comments we receive about our films are from men. I sometimes, if I can persuade them, use my boys as pre-viewers. My eldest reluctantly watched ‘Scars & Souvenirs’ and I was most surprised to see he got a little teary-eyed. If you ask him though what his favourite machinima films have been, he will tell you ‘Only The Strong Survive’ and ‘Bouncers’. I asked Kheri this week if she thought we could pull off something entirely different, she’s always agreed with me that action movies are very hard to pull off in The Sims. She pointed out that we have several projects we plan to make this year, it’s just a pity that we always have more ideas than time to turn them into finished films.

At the moment, we’re in a bit of a filmmaking limbo. Although we love using popular music in our films, we’ve concerned about using unlicensed/copyright music, for many obvious reasons. One of the reason we enjoy putting our stories to music is that it’s easier than finding and co-ordinating willing voice-actors and that music can cross the language barriers. From our website stats I am amazed at how many of our visitors are from continental Europe. I’m not saying that we won’t be using popular artists again, but we’re looking for any bands/singers who’d be willing to us ‘borrow’ their music and might enjoy seeing it put to video.

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