Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Games like Halo and The Sims litter the dorm rooms and apartments of college students. But for some students, those games aren’t just for leisure time.
Matt Baier, Topeka freshman, created “The Adventures of Luke and Joe,” a weekly cartoon originally made from a computer game called “The Movies” that features three-dimensional, realistic characters, similar to other popular video games. Danny Willis, a writer from California, co-created the show and works as the head writer.
The name for the style of the cartoon, “Machinima,” comes from a combination of “machine” and “cinema.” Producers of Machinima originally manipulated the characters and scenes from video games to produce the movies and added a voice track to the action.
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Now there are programs designed specifically for Machinima.
Willis said Machinima was a fringe trend that only “hardcore nerds” knew about a few years ago, but he said it was beginning to be more mainstream. Some Machinima programs can even be purchased on DVD.
Although Baier started “The Adventures of Luke and Joe” with “The Movies,” he transitioned to using a Machinima-specific program called Movie Storm because it gave him more freedom to be creative.
“The Adventures of Luke and Joe” is a comedy that follows two best friends as they find themselves in what Baier called “outrageous situations.”
Baier said Luke was the instigator of the action, while Joe made things more interesting and encouraged Luke to make questionable decisions.
“Joe is there to appeal to his worser angels,” Baier said.
The show’s contributors are scattered around the United States. Willis lives in California and works for the Bay Area News Group outside of San Francisco. He voices the character of Luke, who also works for a newspaper. He said his inspiration came from everyday conversations and events.
In the episode “Video Game Critic,” Luke gets an assignment to review video games and becomes obsessed with them. Willis said the idea for the episode came from his own job as a video game critic and from his friends’ concerns he would become obsessed, too.
Baier said his inspiration came from responding to situations as his character, Joe, would and living life as if he were in a sitcom.
“When you do that it tends to start to become one,” Baier said.
One episode of the series, “Email from the Future,” is based on an e-mail Baier actually received. In the show, Joe tries to keep himself doing what the e-mail tells him to.
Baier and Willis started the program last December and have created 29 seven-to-22-minute episodes and five one-to-two-minute shorts.
Although “The Adventures of Luke and Joe” can be seen only online, that should not keep potential fans from seeing it.
“More and more successful things are happening online, so that’s not necessarily a bad place to be,” Willis said.
The creators of the show recently formed a partnership with RiffTrax, a company that adds humorous voice tracks to movies. Baier and Willis will donate profits from a parody of a sex education video called “As Boys Grow” to Child’s Play, a charity that gives video games to sick children.
Episodes of “The Adventures of Luke and Joe” can be found at www.lukeandjoe.com.
— — Edited by Scott R. Toland
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