“Transmedia Synergies — Remediating Films and Video Games” [video]

Here’s a nice bit of synchronicity. I post this the other day:

From books to plays to theme park rides, Hollywood has a long history of transforming successful intellectual properties into box-office hits.

But when it comes to video games, the track record is surprisingly dismal. Despite sales figures that have made film executives drool — Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 grossed $1 billion in 15 days in December, and Modern Warfare sold $400 million in a single day in 2011 — only one film based on a video game, 2001′s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, has ever crossed the $100 million threshold domestically ($131 million).

Even with the backing of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Disney’s $200 million Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time failed to connect with audiences, taking in only $91 million domestically in 2010. (It fared better overseas.) And the holy grail of modern gaming, Microsoft’s Halo, is languishing in development hell.

So the question: Why have video games had such a hard time making the transition into movies? Here is an interesting voice to add to the conversation, something I stumbled on just yesterday:

Matthias Stork is currently an M.A. student in the Cinema and Media Studies program at UCLA. He is interested in the intersections of cinema and digital media, especially the synergies between films and video games, the aesthetics of neo-spectacle, and video essays as emergent forms of film criticism and scholarship.

Stork’s video gets into pretty brainy territory by touching on numerous concepts circulating in contemporary visual media culture, but the observations and theories are made coherent, palpable, and yes, even fun, through his brilliant use of the video essay form. We get to dive through an arresting array of images from cinematic video games like Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto, as well as video game-like movies such as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Matrix and The Amazing Spiderman. Stork makes inspired use of this rich image bank: split-screens to compare similar elements between video games and movies, and a playful, game-like progression through each phase of his thesis. The clever use of gaming icons, video game fonts and sound effects suggest a video essay version of Super Mario Brothers.

Here is the video:

I agree there is a universe of possibilities, the nexus between movies and video games, but my take is pretty simple: It all boils down to story and characters. There has to be something going on in the Internal World, the emotional and psychological realm, or else no matter how eye-popping the visuals, they amount to nothing more than so much noise.

For more on Stork and the video, go here.