One year and about 30 test screenings into his experimental documentary, Benjamin Ree realized his project was in crisis.
Test audiences said they were lost and unmoved when “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” about a young Norwegian man dying of a degenerative muscle disease who found refuge in the video game World of Warcraft, entered the virtual world.
The documentary initially tracks the story of Mats Steen through traditional interviews with his family and narration from his personal blog posts. Then it pivots to an animated recreation of the game, showing interactions between his avatar, Ibelin, and other players in his gaming guild.
“When we entered animated parts, they said that they just missed being with Mats,” Ree, the director, said of the test audiences. “Then we meet this strangely bearded animated avatar, and then we don’t want to go there.”
It took another year in the editing room before things finally clicked into place. The strategic use of voice-overs and a brief on-screen explainer helped guide viewers into Ibelin’s world and, by extension, Steen’s inner life. But the key breakthrough was centering the first animated scene on Steen’s meeting his online crush in the game for the first time.
The stakes of friendships and love were very relatable, Ree said. No longer did audience members feel confused by a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that reached a peak of 12 million monthly subscribers in 2010.
“When you view gaming from the outside in a stereotypical way, it’s often someone sitting in a dark room by themselves,” said Rasmus Tukia, the documentary’s sole animator. “But you don’t really know, which is the message of the film, that they could be immersed, and they can have real friends and connections.”
So how does a filmmaker imbue a believable, tangible sense of human emotion and reality into digital avatars?
It is a challenge that sits at the heart of Ree’s film as well as the recent documentaries “Knit’s Island,” a strangely profound meditation on the digital world that is captured inside the survival game DayZ, and “Grand Theft Hamlet,” about gamers attempting to stage Shakespeare within Grand Theft Auto Online.
Ree said it is vital for documentaries to explore machinima — video content that is based on or taken from gameplay and has long been used in comedy shorts. “Some people’s lives are lived inside the games, so we need to tell those stories,” he said.
“The Remarkable Tale of Ibelin,” which was released on Netflix on Friday, tells two stories of Steen’s life: his physical one, battling Duchenne muscular dystrophy, but also the virtual one that his family did not know about.
When Steen died in 2014 at the age of 25, his parents posted an announcement on his blog and were flooded with messages from gamers reflecting on Steen’s influence. A hidden side of their son’s life unfolded before them.
Ree wanted to make a film that would make even nongamers understand the full life that Steen, who spent his final years in a wheelchair, experienced through his barrel-chested, ginger-haired avatar Ibelin: falling in love, finding community, experiencing both conflict and vulnerability.
The director’s path became clear as he parsed through tens of thousands of pages of chat logs where Steen and other players wrote out actions and reactions to convey their feelings within World of Warcraft.
“I saw that it’s actually a coming-of-age story here,” Ree said. “That was something that intrigued me a lot: ‘How is it like growing up inside a game?’”
To tell Steen’s story, Ree decided to translate the chat logs into an animated film that used real dialogue, real characters and real events. When he reached out to an animation studio whose World of Warcraft machinima impressed him, he discovered it was all the creation of Tukia, a 30-year-old animator who had mostly been creating YouTube videos out of his parents’ house. Like Steen, Tukia had played a lot of World of Warcraft, giving him an understanding of the emotional depth the game could offer.
“The biggest challenge is the fact that this is taken from a real life, essentially,” Tukia said of working on the film. “It’s not just some character that we make up for the story. So nailing his expressions, I iterate upon it many times.”
Tukia used rudimentary gameplay footage as initial storyboards before translating them into more detailed 3-D animation, aiming for heightened scenes that still felt true to the game. He was guided by the chat logs, treating them like scripts and bringing big and small interactions to life, including the moment that Ibelin’s crush playfully steals his hat.
The recreations form a portrait of Steen as the deeply sensitive, beating heart of Starlight, his World of Warcraft guild, an empathetic ear for others even as he struggled to open up about his physical condition.
It was crucial for Tukia and Ree to involve Steen’s friends from Starlight. Several participated in interviews and provided notes about the authenticity of their characters.
Ree recalled the nerve-racking experience of showing the finished film to Starlight members — some of whom had attended Steen’s funeral, one delivering a eulogy. “The best kind of compliment we got was from Starlight afterward,” Ree said. “They said, ‘That was how Ibelin was.’”
The result is a strangely moving act of resurrection, adding dimension to and affirming the meaning behind an avatar life, a meaning that Steen himself sometimes seemed not to grasp. Ree noted the intentionally repetitive structure within the film, which retells Steen’s story in various forms, creating a kind of symphony of grief.
When Ree asked Blizzard Entertainment, the video game studio behind World of Warcraft, to approve the use of its intellectual property, he nervously showed the finished film to executives. They were brought to tears, he said.
Steen’s father, Robert, sees the documentary every time it is shown in Norway, Ree said. By now, he has watched it nearly 200 times.
“Mats’s parents say that watching the film is like opening a wound, but it’s also healing — it’s doing both,” Ree said.
The post Can an Avatar Display Human Emotion? This Documentary Believes So. appeared first on New York Times.
