Ten years ago, I finally finished my eight-year-project: Block Wars - Episode IV - No Hope.Nineteen years ago, this December, I started a topic on the BLF in community projects (now called Forum Games) called "making a movie, need help." It was vague so I renamed it to Block Wars No Hope. It was the most autistic thing a 14 year old could do, and yet, here we are.
Right from the beginning we had a great amount of folks who wanted to help, including the biggest add-on maker of that era, Blockland legend Packer. He added a sense of seriousness to it that elevated the project from some silly parody project to a legit comedy video.
The idea came to me a few weeks after the Family Guy parody, Blue Harvest, aired a few weeks prior. Star Wars was on the brain often for me in this era, Episode 3 was just released on DVD, and Lego Star Wars II came out a year prior (20 years as of this year, yikes), and I felt that Seth MacFarland was a hack and I could do better. Something so egotistical only a 14 year old could muster.
So I pitched the idea to an IRL friend who was playing blockland with me, WRB852, and he immediately was on board. We'd been making videos together using handmedown cameras for years, and Garry's Mod machinma dominated YouTube pop culture, so we knew that with our combined skills and creativity, we could do something as crazy as doing a feature length parody of Star Wars in our new favorite sandbox game.
We got to work on shooting the project immediately. At first I took a backseat roll with the production, I'd write the script and voice as many of the characters as I could feasibly do, but the actual act of shooting and recording was done on WRB's computer.
When you'd open up a server asking for actors while in Blockland's prime meant a lot of riff raff. Shooting was abysmal. We'd get actors who could only participate for a short session, players who didn't want to participate at all and just crash the server by spamming the custom vehicles and weapons, or just folks who'd happily participate until we actually called action and then they'd forget around and not do what you'd ask. It was horrible trying to work like that and we never got a lot done despite hours of work.
I think it was this reason that, after almost two years of working on it, in 2009 we released what was essentially Block Wars to most people who know about it, the first ten minutes of the parody in all its glory; at the end of the video we asked for help from the community to see the project finished and to perhaps make the process a little easier than just the two to three of us on a team. We had hopes it would attract actors who could make the process much faster.
Of course that never happened, we kept working on the film at a snails pace as the core of our team started to dissolve. By 2010 we were juniors in high school, 2011 we graduated and went off to college, 2012 WRB's old hard drive officially crashed and we lost all of the raw footage and builds.
I put the project on an extended hiatus to the public. It wasn't finished, and we acknowledged that, but we still planned to. I'd go on to join Darkstar and his clan BEE as the lead voice actor for projects. Behind the scenes I was working on a "reboot" of Block Wars, starting from where the original footage left off and continuing from there. Darkstar himself had laid down voice lines for Luke Skywalker, but those are sadly lost to time as I also had a hard drive fail on me during the ordeal.
Publicly the project was the butt end of a joke, the "Duke Nukem Forever of Blockland Machinima" we had lovingly dubbed it at one point. But I was still adamant that the project be finished.
Then, 2015 came along. The Force Awakens had made Star Wars not just relevant again after ten years, but popular. The marketing machine that is Star Wars was pumping out nostalgia as a product. It was time to strike while the iron was hot.
Whirlwind, a user who deserves just as much recognition as Packer did in his day, created his filmbots sometime around this era, and suddenly the whole of Machinima making could be accessible again to me. No more would I be at the whim of random players joining and unjoining my server, no more would I have performance captures that were boring and unable to convey, no more would I be shackled to the lag of an online connection. In 2015 I turned 22—I felt more like an adult than I ever had, and it felt right to finally put to rest this now almost decade old idea.
Cowboydude deserves a lot of credit for getting me to finally finish. He messaged me sometime earlier and asked me if I would give him permission to make a short film based on Block Wars, that was his own parody of the battle of hoth in the empire strikes back. I was flattered he even thought to ask, I certainly didn't invent star wars, nor parodying it, nor was I even the first to make a Blockland star wars video. But it let me know how cemented the original Block Wars was in our little community as one of those videos people remember fondly.
With him at my side, and our newly formed BLC clan (a retool of the old BEE clan that I had technically been left in charge of), we got straight to work building sets, add-ons, and recording voice lines with the actors. It was going to happen this time.
After a year's worth of work, using a mixture of filmbots and traditional filming with other players, we did it. We finally had our one hour long version of the feature film Star Wars lovingly recreated and parodied in Blockland.
i rate this 2/5 stars. the build quality is good and the 3d animations and models were well made, as well as some of the greenscreen effects. however, star wars is not a joke, and it does not deserve to be treated as such.
It was poorly received and nothing more ever came from it.
As a way of commemorating the now decade it's been since the video's release, I've decided two things: one (assuming I can get it done by May 4th, if I can't then my next date is December 22nd, the Block Wars project anniversary) I will (hopefully) be releasing Block Wars Saga: Episode 3 - You Will Sith Bricks on Star Wars day (I know, I missed the 20th anniversary of RotS, I suck), and as is now tradition, I will be doing a Blockland machinima deep dive livestream on my youtube channel, culminating with a live re-watch of Block Wars 2016.
We'll go over BEE stuff (stuff I'm involved with and stuff I'm not), machinima history, some of my own stories, all the versions of Block Wars, any behind the scenes I have to share, and then watch the video together with my commentary. I'll invite the old gaggle of BLC friends to join, maybe if they're not busy I can get some cool oldcigarette names to show up like Filipe, Packer, or Darkstar (do not hold out hope on that last one, he's busy with a real animation job these days and I do not blame him if he can't lol).
I'm making this thread now as a catch-all for the event in May, I'll post old stuff here as I find it, plus it'll hopefully act as an incentive to keep me at my word of getting Episode 3 done before May? I'm notorious for not finishing things when I think they'll get finished, IRL stuff usually gets in the way of my making free internet content, but I'm really hoping I get this one out so I can round off the prequel trilogy as something I've actually made.
And then next year, the whole project turns 20... and the linear passage of time makes me sick :)
