Sunday 19 June 2011

Saber~Cow: The Battle [Halo: Reach]

Organised chaos or a failed coup?
Rating: ***

Creator: Saber~Cow (www.sabercow.com)
Distributed by: Machinima.com (www.machinima.com)

Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDdu0U3D8aw


If there is one thing I despise it is people who make ill-informed comments regarding information freely available in a videos description box. Every time I see an annotation saying 'Please check the description!' I despair that the author has watched what should be a forum to discuss their work devolve into a samey nitpick of one tiny detail. In this case nobody seems to heed the description OR the opening title of this machinima which directly identify it as an "experiment" with no story or characterisation, it is simply a showcase for various camera techniques and cinematic effects. Whether it is any good is another matter.

Sea~Cow appears to have simply taken a traditional online game of Halo: Reach and added some nice camera angles, if we ignore the uncoordinated clumsiness of some players and focus instead on the cinematography then we can judge how promising The Battle is. Though some is rather shaky (literally, the camera careens around, zooms erratically and sometimes loses the players altogether) there are moments of brilliance, the sequence of grenades funneled through an lift is particularly clever, the camera is drawn to the shimmer of active camouflage in time with our own eyes and it's a testament to how dramatic and intense battles of wits can erupt unplanned over Xbox Live in a heartbeat. As an experiment it is by no means terrible, the indication seems to be that Saber~Cow wants to make this a series or larger project. In my opinion, with some tightening of angles and editing, 'reality-machinima' could be a very interesting sub-genre.

The Machinima Review
"If the critics were always right, we should be in deep trouble" - Robert Morely

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