As an independent Australian filmmaker, academic and recent Machinima producer, Leo Berkeley provides a valuable perspective on the form. The interest here extends from his cinematic background. Directing films (both short and long) and other projects for nearly thirty years:
“Leo Berkeley’s films are often concerned with exploring the drama of the everyday — the distance between characters’ ordinary lives and their dreams, between one person and another, between the appearance of things and their significance. He is interested in the poetry of the mundane and dramatically unfashionable material like people’s relationship to their work and the chores, commitments and routines which fill their days and limit their individual freedom. However, his approach has always been to deal with this material in a lively and entertaining way.” (Melbourne Independent Filmmakers: A Web Resource)
Indeed, Berkeley’s Machinima — Ending With Andre (2005)- depicts quotidian life in a most lively manner. This is achieved through the Sims engine, as its focus is on the workings of mundane suburban life, explored by the most “animated” of characters.
Berkeley relates the creation of his Machinima as “very much like a documentary process — where you go into an environment, & you’re not really sure of what’s going to happen, & you just capture things as best you can. & you get a whole lot of surprises, because you don’t know what’s going on.” (Berkeley, 2006) It is such surprises that actually inspired the story for him. After creating a female character, and capturing several days of gameplay where she would engage in everyday activities:
“An angry man dressed in black accosted her at a shopping centre. Shortly after, he arrived at her house uninvited, upsetting her greatly. On the basis of this gameplay material, I created a story for my machinima where the man in black was a violent ex-boyfriend she was hiding from. I wrote a voice-over to dramatise and elaborate this story and edited the video captured from the gameplay consistent with the script.” (Berkeley, 2006 — AJETS p.71)
This demonstrates a style of Machinima associated with ‘live action’ capturing, unlike the scripted works of other Machinima creators, such as Thuyen Nguyen. Berkeley’s is a more free and experimental approach to the form.
And although he may be an Australian Machinima producer, Berkeley does not view a his own cultural surroundings to be of great significance when creating his works (Machinima and otherwise):
“I don’t really get into the idea that you should strain to show how Australian you are or anything like that. I just think we’re all people and you just come up the stories that reflect your experience and your creative interests. And in theory that should reflect your community, your society, your background in various ways.” (Berkeley, 2006)
This also appears to be a common aspect of Machinima, as with many other forms emerging within the new media landscape — local identity is lost within the global phenomenon.