Second Take

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Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky score big at the Sundance Film Festival with IndieGames: The Movie (IAN MCCAUSLAND)

That there was a clear parallel between two Winnipeg filmmakers and the subjects of their first full-length documentary became unmistakable.
   
"We saw a lot of ourselves in these guys," says James Swirsky, in reference to the independent video-game designers at the centre of his and co-director Lisanne Pajot’s Indie Game: The Movie, which overcame enormous competition to become an official selection of the past week’s 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
   
The film follows four developers working on three different games as they try to make the best creations they possibly can — and hopefully see their work succeed in the sometimes wildly lucrative gaming market.
   
Like indie filmmakers, Swirsky continues, these designers were using accessible technology, their own good ideas and a lot of hard work "to try to get through to a wider audience.
   
"And just like with any other artist, they were starting with zero guarantee of finding an audience."
   
For Swirksy and Pajot, of course, things have worked out: their film not only won the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award at Sundance, it’s been acquired by HBO and producer Scott Rudin (The Social Network) to be developed as a fictional half-hour comedy series, reports movie industry website Deadline.com.
   
"We just found a fantastic story," Swirsky says. "The movie’s really about creating."
   
Which brings us back to the idea of video-game designers as artists — a point that’s been hotly debated, perhaps most famously on the blog of movie critic Roger Ebert, who claimed video games could never be art (before finally conceding that they potentially could).
   
"What makes the film ‘new’ is how it presents these creators as a new breed of independent artist," Pajot says. "We’re not the first people to look at the subject, but our doc seems to be a breakthrough."
   
The filmmakers themselves hadn’t considered their subject in that way, until they met and produced a short doc on local designer and programmer Alec Holowka. After the project received an impressive number of hits online, it spurred Swirsky and Pajot to explore the subject further, culminating in finding a "world of people" at the Independent Games Summit in San Francisco.
   
"We hadn’t previously thought of games as a means of personal expression," Pajot says. "People don’t realize what goes into them, because they’re thought of as products for ‘fun.’
   
"And a lot of people don’t realize what the payoff can be. Some designers have become millionaires almost overnight."
   
The filmmakers’ own success has certainly been nothing less than a whirlwind.
   
"I never feasibly thought I’d be at Sundance," Swirsky says. "You can’t realistically make it part of your career strategy. It’s not healthy to do."
   
Which makes the film’s reception all the more surreal, with the likes of director Brad Bird (Ratatouille, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) tweeting effusively about it, and enthusiastic notices appearing in The Hollywood Reporter and The Guardian.
   
"We’ve tapped into an enormous interest in the subject," Pajot says. "Luckily, everyone seems to like it."
   
For more information on Indie Game: The Movie, visit indiegamethemovie.com.