Director/Producer: Thuyen Nguyen
Year: 2006
Length: 5 mins
Synopsis:
The poignant story of a man’s last online diary entry. Seemingly stranded in the middle of a war zone, his home neighbourhood is under attack, his family have fled, and he is left alone, desperate to share his simple story with the aggressive world surrounding him.
Analysis:
The most outstanding features of this work are its powerful use of camera and subtitle. Nguyen maximises these two aspects in order to create an engaging story, with a global theme.
The Sims engine permits gamers to maintain complete control over camera. This in fact frees a Machinima producer to use camera in ways that may not be viable when shooting in the real world — for example, the ability to move through walls and other objects, or the inexpensiveness of creating dolly or crane effects. However, the disadvantage of this new-found freedom is that many Machinima creators tend to overuse such effects.
Nguyen, nevertheless steers clear of these flashy effects, and rather uses the visual freedom to employ an effect that is customary in filmmaking, but rare in Machinima — the close-up. Nguyen uses close-ups of the main character’s typing hands and noticeably still facial expression to create an impression of his character that is far more human than the outrageous movements and expressions of the Bookstore characters. These are then intercut with close-ups of items in the room surrounding the character — the candlelight, family portraits and empty crib are grim reminders of the true impact that a war has on average citizens.
Further, these cuts between the room’s objects and different angles on the man’s typing make for dramatic imagery of what is the one subtle action. Thuyen Nguyen admits the deliberateness of this, as he recognises the limits of the Sims’ animations:
“Everything they do is wacky and overblown, because they don’t talk so they just talk with their hands. So its really hard to get subtle emotion. A lot of the animations I use in An Unfair War aren’t what you’re meant to see on screen, like they’re either the start of an animation where it ends up being really wacky, or the end of an animation where he’s calming himself down. So it was a challenge to find something that could be mistaken for emotion, when actually it isn’t… it’s a slight of hand.” (Nguyen, 2006)
Finally, the camera is used to illustrate the action that is occurring outside the room that we are situated in. At the beginning of the piece, we can hear explosions in the distance. However, the camera is focused on the typing, so this is louder. As the explosions get louder and nearer, the camera starts to shake with each bomb. Here, Nguyen applies the camera to replicate an effect that cannot be achieved within the parameters of the Sims engine — creating explosions.
The other noticeable feature of An Unfair War is the use of subtitles. The subtitle is not an effect that can be produced within the Sims game, rather it is an after-effect that Nguyen has applied. Nevertheless, it is most interesting in what is achieved here, as opposed to inserting a voiceover. Where a voiceover can be recognised in terms of emotion and orientation, as one can discern pitch, inflection, breathing patterns, as well as accent. Subtitles include none of these indicators. Thus, it can be read in a number of ways — the man typing could be angry, sad, scared. He could also be French, Israeli, Australian - we are never told, and hence his story is universal.
Thuyen Nguyen’s application of the classic filmmaking techniques of camera, editing and subtitles create a powerfully subtle reflection on humanity. Indeed, this is a unique type of Machinima — mature and moving.