Indie Game: The Movie
Hi, I’m Lisanne Pajot, a filmmaker from Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Over the past almost 2 years, my partner, James Swirsky, and I have been working on a feature documentary about making video games, Indie Game: The Movie*. The film follows the journeys of indie game developers as they make and release their games to a world wide audience.
With some great support from the Internet, we started shooting the film in September 2010, travelling all over North America, mostly in our car. James and I did everything ourselves – directing, producing, editing, filming (everything but the soundtrack made by another Canadian, Jim Guthrie). And, to our surprise our little film was selected to premiere at one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, the Sundance Film Festival in the World Documentary Competition.
Going to Sundance was a bit of a surreal experience. It’s a 10-day long festival in located about an hour away from Salt Lake City, in the ski-town of Park City, Utah. You’ve got beautiful mountains surrounding you, lots of snow, and a bunch of people from California. Hollywood takes over the town for about 5 days of the festival. Picture celebrities, bundled up, walking around the town. We were told by the festival organizers, “Don’t forget to come equipped for cold and snow.” – and we were like “We got it covered. We’re from Canada!”
But, our Sundance experience wasn’t Main St. strolling and celebrity-spotting. We spent all our time screening our film, doing Q&As, talking to media and having meetings.
It was very overwhelming to have so many people interested in our film. The reception went beyond our expectations. We got some great feedback from audiences, some wonderful reviews, some nice tweets from big-time directors, and we won an award. We won Best Editing in World Documentary Cinema.
Going up to receive that award, I was totally shocked. I truly didn’t expect to win anything – we felt like winners for just being there. When they started describing our project, my legs felt totally numb. I thought I was going to fall over. I’m surprised I made it up there.
It was very satisfying to have a jury of documentary/film-making experts honour your work. It was, indeed, a celebration of the 2 years we put into the film. It felt great.
So, it was successful trip. We feel really fortunate that we got to go, and we hope we can screen our next film there…whenever we get a chance to start that one.
Fun fact; we stayed a little outside the town of Park City, in a area called the Canyons. Every morning/night, we’d take a gondola between our hotel on the mountain and the bus stop. It was pretty incredible. Made us wish we had time to ski!
*Here’s the trailer to our movie;
EMBED TRAILER VIDEO http://vimeo.com/25268139 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhaT78i1x2M
Indie games are a growing medium/movement. You can find them on all the major consoles (in the downloaded content sections), on-line (from developer websites & sites like Steampowered.com) and on the App store. The developers who make these games are usually 1-2 person teams working on personal, unique games on their own. They are pouring all of themselves into their work, sacrificing money, health and sanity to finish their games, in the hope that they may find connection and success.
The film is about making games, but it’s core, it’s about the creative process, perseverance and our relationship with our work and the Internet.
* All photos courtesy of Indie Game: The Movie