In addition to teaching freshman composition (English 191), I also intern for an Arthurian Literature course where the students just read the Welsh text Culhwch and Olwen (C&O). I decided during the course of the reading that the text lent itself perfectly to being adapted into machinima, in particular using the platform World of Warcraft (WoW) to film. Excepting that most of my readers aren’t familiar with either C&W or WoW, I will do my best to explain the vision for the adaptation and how it would aid students in learning the content of the text.
The story of C&O is one of the earliest appearances of Arthur in surviving literature. It details the winning of Olwen, the daughter of Ysbaddadon Chief Giant, by Culhwch, the cousin of King Arthur. In short: Culhwch gains the assistance of Arthur and his knights to help him win Olwen; Ysbaddadon gives Culhwch ~40 seemingly impossible tasks/quests to accomplish before he will consent to the marriage. The knights complete a large number of quests in the text (and presumably many more completed but excluded from the text) with brutal tactics and cunning trickery.
WoW is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) that allows players to control heroic avatars who slay monsters, explore sublime landscapes, and complete epic quests. The game boasts over 11 million subscribers and is one of the most successful computer games to date. Because of its player base, it has become one of the premier game engines used to machinimate. It has wide recognition even among non-gamers (though by no means a household name).
What I hope to do in subsequent blog posts is detail, outline, plan and format the machinimation of a C&O adaptation. I will discuss what my teaching goals for the project are: whether I want the film to replace the text, supplement the text, act as a secondary source for the text, explicate the text, critique the text, or something else. Based on those goals I will decide my approach in the creation: will the film be a comic parody? A close reading? A biting critique? In addition, I will elaborate on my creative process: how I choose which scenes to film and which to eliminate, what setting in game to film in, which character models to use, what props to exercise, and so on.
Being that I have only ever enjoyed machinima as a spectator, I intend to post about my experiences learning the technology necessary to complete the film. There is a lot to learn and a lot to do, but hopefully keeping a blog about the experiences will keep me on track to finish the project by semester’s end. Comments (whether questions or feedback or support) will definitely help keep me on task.
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