Annnndd….ACTION!

BB41: Director’s Cut

The universe of EVE is not without its drama and epic stories, both in and out of game. Imagine a publisher, movie studio or television network asked you to prepare a pitch for a new brand of EVE-flavoured entertainment. This could be your big break, what would be your synopsis to bring New Eden to the wider audience?

A synopsis*? Of EVE? There we have the equivalent of trying to get a giant recalcitrant drunken octopus dressed in a diving suit.    First off EVE is big, REALLY BIG not just in terms of its intergalactic scale but also in terms of its depth of complexity, its myriad agents and forces from the machinations of the players themselves to the often obscure NPC races, factions and history.

That might be a start of course and it practically screams ‘big summer block buster movie!!’ replete with 3D CGI star ships flinging obscene amounts of ordnance at each other.    Would that attract a ‘wider audience’ however? I’m pretty sure it would attract EVEs current demographic of 27 year old men with a penchant for (well you guessed it)  – star ships flinging obscene amounts of ordnance at each other.  Good luck dragging your wife to the premier though.

The other alternative (shudder) is to reprise our summer block buster with an angst torn teen female lead with an unrequited longing for the ‘bad guy’ who ideally is a ‘bit vampire like’.  A sure fire hit.

What about that staple medium of television? Naturally New Edens universe would need to compete with the usual crop of reality tv shows featuring b list celebrities demonstrating their peculiar lack of talent in some form of dancing, singing skate off with the selection being narrowed down by you the audience! So that’s recordings of drunken FCs singing on ventrilo/team speak then. Naturally we’d call the show “The PLEX Factor”.

All in all then our proposed pitch to dour men in suits is not entirely going according to plan which, to be fair, is hardly surprising.  Most publishers don’t want something new – what they want is the old successful stuff repackaged in a modern 3D format and multiple ‘likes’ on BookFace.

So is there an alternative?

Well for my money (not that I have any) there is.  EVE Online exists on the interwebs and that most embryonic of formats holds the key – not multi billion pound budget films or a Star Trek series rehashed with an Abaddon reprising the role of the USS Enterprise (to boldly gank where no man has ganked before…).   EVE has already spawned the rather successful and witty Clear Skies and popular sci fi TV dramas are actually being converted towards the web (Battlestar Galactica – Blood and Chrome) rather than away from it.  EVEs graphical impact, alongside its much maligned Incarna era avatars holds at least the potential for a machinima styled mini series.  Some of the more recent expansion trailers hint at this capability to produce ‘bite size chunks’ of EVEs treacherous nature, and as we’ve already seen EVE really does need to be consumed in bite sized morsels. Which of course is what a synopsis is.

*A synopsis is a brief summary of the major points of a written work, either as prose or as a table; an abridgment or condensation of a work.

• Humanity has always dreamed of venturing to the stars by Lukas Rox @ Torchwood Archives
• Eve Online for Everyone by Oreamnos Amric @ 2nd Anomaly from the Left
• Screenplay by Kirith Kodachi @ Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah
• Enter Eve by Sugar Kyle @ Low Sec Lifestyle
• Immortalis by Helena Khan @ Aggressive Logistics
• My Eve Hollywood Blockbuster by Drackarn @ Sand, Cider and Spaceships
• Making the cut with the director by Emergent Patroller
• Director’s Cut by Rixx Javix @ Eveoganda
• Eytjangard Blues by Kuan Yida @ Random Posts from Auga
• YC113: An Empyrean Odyssey by TurAmarth ElRandir @ A Carbon Based Life
• BB41: Director’s Cut by Splatus @ A Journey Through the Mind
• It’s a Show About Nothing by Firstly @ Flying Silent
• Based on (True) Stories by Whistlerbean @ Shelter for an Empyrean
• EVE Online: The Movie by Roc Wieler @ Roc’s Ramblings