On Screen Manitoba

Indie Games - The Weblog recently conducted an interview with OSM members Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky from Blinkworks. Pajot and Swirsky are currently in San Fransisco attending the Game Developers Conference where they will be speaking about their project, Indie Game: The Movie, which is creating quite a buzz ahead of its release. This article goes a bit more in depth on the structure of the film.

Filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot of BlinkWorks are currently preparing the teaser for their documentary Indie Game: The Movie. While numerous segments from the film have already been posted to Vimeo, the upcoming preview will offer a more well-rounded sense of the structure of the feature-length film.

Production on Indie Game: The Movie resulted from BlinkWorks' meeting with fellow Manitoban Alec Holowka, co-creator of IGF Grand Prize winner Aquaria. As it turned out, both those documenting New Media Manitoba's Business Showcase and their subject shared many of the same creative aspirations. Funding for a full documentary on independent games was soon secured through the Kickstarter crowd funding network, while the completed film is currently scheduled for release later this year.

In this interview, we hear some concrete details about the documentary's narrative structure. Indie Game: The Movie will tell the development stories of Phil Fish of Fez, together with Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen of Super Meat Boy. These personal journeys will be complemented by a range of viewpoints from other designers and industry experts, including Jonathan Blow, Derek Yu, Brandon Boyer and Jason Rohrer.

What are some of the key dramatic elements that define the narrative context of your film?

James Swirsky: Going into this we weren't too sure what that narrative arc would be. We didn't want to make a film where someone could watch ten minutes from the beginning and ten minutes from the end and not know which was which.

While still doing research for the film, we caught up with Team Meat during the IGF Awards. Within ten minutes of interviewing Tommy and Edmund [designers of Super Meat Boy] we kind of looked at each other and were like, "There's totally a movie here."

These guys have a great story, and we caught up with them early enough that their timeline for the game perfectly fit our timeline for production. It provided a nice narrative throughline of sacrifice and passion, which turned out to be quite dramatic.

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