The Remarkable Life of Ibelinnow streaming on Netflix, is a film nested within another. The outer film is a sensitive, moving documentary about the Norwegian Mats Steen World of Warcraft Player who died of a degenerative muscle disease at the age of 25. Included is a more humorous, colorful but still heartfelt animated film that captures the adventures, friendships, crushes and guild drama that Steen experienced online with his character Ibelin – a swashbuckling mustachioed ladies’ man.
The animation was authentically rendered in the game Wow Models are more than just a gimmick. When Steen’s condition and the psychological problems that accompanied it forced him to withdraw from the real world, his inner life Wow and his role-playing guild, Starlight, became the core of his existence – something that belonged to him Parents only discovered it after his death. The contrast between these richly animated sequences and the home video of Mats sitting almost motionless at his computer is simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting. Animation is the only way to capture the entirety of his life: the film explores how the virtual environment gave him physical freedom, romantic connections and a deep sense of community that he could not enjoy in the real world.
Watch out IbelinI assumed Wow Developer Blizzard must have been involved in the creation somehow – the quality of the animation is so high and it’s so authentic to the game world. But director Benjamin Ree and animator Rasmus Tukia told me that they actually put off contacting Blizzard until their film was almost finished. Ree and producer Ingvil Giske had been working on the film for three years before even approaching the game studio.
“We wrote them an email saying that We are a small Norwegian production company and we made this filmRee said, laughing. “Can we use your intellectual property, your world, for free and without your involvement?“Ree said Giske referred to this as “the Norwegian way” – “We just took the rights and then tried to ask for forgiveness.”
Blizzard invited the filmmakers to a high-profile screening at its offices in California. Giske was relaxed, but Ree, who describes himself as “very neurotic”, took extra doses of asthma medication before the meeting “to breathe”. He needn’t have worried. “We showed them the film and then one of the bosses turned to us and cried. He said: “It’s a fantastic film and you get the rights to use it.” [whatever you need].’”
Tukia was also nervous, even though he knew from experience that Blizzard is surprisingly liberal when it comes to the use of its assets compared to some other companies. He is a member of Wow‘S machinima Fan animation community that Blizzard traditionally supports. “They have always supported us and anyone who uses their wealth, and that goes for their music too,” he said. “They will not come with this copyright infringement [takedowns] or whatever, because I think in the end it kind of helps them promote their game.”
Tukia started playing World of Warcraft In 2005, when he was 12 years old, and not long after, he used the game to make something simple animated videos for his YouTube channel. Around 2015, he discovered the software the community had developed to export the assets they wanted to use from the game files for use in animation programs such as: B. to use Maya. The quality of Tukia’s production suddenly improved; He went from making gross fake music videos to cleverly edited, character-based short stories.
Ree found these videos while looking for ways to visualize Steen’s online life. He had an amazing resource to draw on: Starlight provided Steen’s family with 42,000 pages of role-playing logs, character diaries, forum posts, and non-character chat logs that illustrated the relationships Steen had built as part of his extensive online fantasy life.
Ree knew that this archive contained a universal story, and he just needed an understandable way to tell it. “I saw that it was almost like a coming-of-age story there, and I could see in it a lot of the things that Mats had experienced through Ibelin World of Warcraft” he said. “My goal was to make my 94-year-old grandmother feel integrated into this world at the same time [we would] Make a representation of the game [WoW players] would find it representative.”
The humorous, sometimes sentimental tone of Tukia’s videos and his penchant for expressive close-ups of characters’ faces were spot on. “We thought his YouTube channel was great. It felt very authentic to the game,” Ree said. He traveled from Norway to Tukia’s native Sweden, expecting to meet at the offices of a small animation company. Instead, he found himself at Tukia’s parents’ house, presenting the film over a dinner with Tukia’s mother’s lasagna.
“I was very moved and it didn’t take much convincing to take part,” remembers Tukia. “The fact that they wanted me to have my hands [on] to enliven someone’s life […] I mean, the world is fictional, but the settings and the people there are very real. So I felt it was such an honor to take on the role of animating real people based on real events. I took this very seriously. I really didn’t want to misrepresent anyone.”
A big part of it The Remarkable Life of IbelinThe running time is animated, but Tukia worked largely alone, animating all of the key characters, handling camera work, and editing his segments; Two other YouTubers helped with background characters, rigging and rendering. (According to Ree, the only help Blizzard provided was to provide a leveled-up character so the team could capture real game footage to use alongside the animation.)
Tukia resisted the temptation to apply too much gloss Wow World in developing his own animation. “I mean, the whole movie is ultimately about authenticity,” he said. “We could have just improved the path further and made the lighting look super good and embossed all the textures, but that wouldn’t have felt really authentic to the material. We really just wanted it to look like a game rather than a movie represent as a film.”
Authenticity too World of Warcraft was a concern, but it was even more important that the animation be true to the stories of Steen and his guildmates, as well as their portrayals of themselves in the game. Luckily, her text roleplay was very specific and descriptive.
“The fascinating thing about their style of role-playing games is that they write such detailed descriptions, including the actions and emotions of the characters,” said Ree. “So Mats wrote for Ibelin like this: ‘Ibelin seems sincere and yet sad.’ And that gave us a lot of opportunities to creatively interpret this writing, this role-playing game.”
The filmmakers consulted with Starlight members throughout and were confident that they would receive the guild’s approval when they finally showed the film to them. “They had a comment that they thought was a mistake, and that was that a lot of the women Ibelin was interested in usually wore more… leather clothes,” he laughed. “After that feedback, we went back and swapped out some of the female characters’ clothing to give them more leather. We then blocked processing.”
Image: Netflix
Tukia says his favorite scene in the film is a montage that shows the flirtation – within the role-playing game, but perhaps a bit beyond it – between Ibelin/Mats and a character named Rumor, played by a guild member named Lisette.
“It means a little bit of playfulness, but also that feeling of falling in love for the first time,” Tukia said. “And you can see that [Mats] goes into it…It’s the epitome of his happiness in a way. In the film he likes to run because it shows that his chains are broken. And the fact that he actually ran with Rumor and invited her to run with him, I think that’s really nice.”
Tukia recognizes this fragile, illusory, but emotionally very real world because it is a world from which he comes. “I met my partner online,” he said. “I also met the YouTube team with whom I make videos online. In some ways, most of my life has revolved around meeting people online. I obviously didn’t have that [Mats’] Handicap, but I think most players can somehow see themselves in his situation.”
For Ree, the world that Steen and his guild shared was both foreign and somewhat nostalgic – a reminder of the kinds of friendships he had made earlier in his life. “The biggest thing I’ve thought about a lot after making this film is the value of spending a lot of time together, and I really envy that,” Ree said. “When I look at Mats and his friends, they spent about five hours every day hanging out. It was very similar to the feeling of being a child when I was [would] I just walked over to the neighbor’s house and we just hung out. We had time to just stay together. It also shows why around 50 people wrote to Mats’ parents after his death and told them what he had meant to them. Mats has changed the lives of so many people.”
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is now streaming on Netflix.
