
You may not know the name Nick Murphy but if you are an avid reader of the site or just into video games in general you are more than aware of his handiwork. Nick won a Geek Award last year for his trailers for Zelda (1987) and Indie God of War, and he has now tackled the game that seems to come on every electronic device from Nooks to microwave ovens these days… Angry Birds.
I spoke with him about directing his newest trailer and what goes into creating these little viral masterpieces. You can check out his newest parody at the end of the interview.
So how did you get started doing these game parodies?
I got hired working for the company Gamervision, they were setup already and they were like a video game news site and they had some web video content. They had this idea of combining Mario Brothers, but as Inglourious Basterds since the film was to come out.
So a friend of mine worked there and was like, I know my friend is a filmmaker lets bring him on. So they brought me in and I did it and it got like 300,000 or 400,000 views so it got passed all over the place and went pretty viral.
So right after that, they paid me for my time working on that, and they were like we want to hire you full time. So we kept making shorts.
It started there and we tried to keep that momentum going. It was a lot of fun. I love it but it is such a niche thing. I am always trying to find that guy that loves video games, but loves movies the way I do too.
What do you think goes into a good video game mash-up trailer?
It’s hard because someone else did an Angry Birds thing and it has like 11 million views. But they did it in a way where it is super over the top. It’s like Michael Bay doing it. There was this government program that manufacture these birds to fight these pigs, who are the enemy.
For us that was an easy joke. We wanted to challenge ourselves and try and incorporated it into the real world. They came out with this Mortal Kombat realistic, gritty web series, so we thought if they can come out with something like that we can make Angry Birds gritty and visceral I guess. That is what I wanted, could this be a real thing?
(more…)