My directorial debut

 As I read about Patrick Mcgoohan and his conflict with staff during the production of the Prisoner, I was reminded of my own difficulties with making an interactive movie.

I had a computer class in college where we worked as a team to make a sort of video game. The trouble was, nobody really got my vision. They were all in college for different things, and this was just an assignment for a grade to them. I was the only one who really wanted this to be a cool entertainment product. It also went into some creative detours I didn't like, and the graphics and some other stuff didn't go the way I wanted. 

The plot of the game was that aliens were taking over Kansas City and using those hair curler things on top of bartle hall as weapons. Your job was to locate pieces of an alien weapon scattered through Kansas City history and use it to blow up the hair curlers. Sounded cool in theory, but it didn't turn out very good.

I don't know if the educational content was required, or just a suggestion at our planning meeting, but I didn't like it. We did a sort of time travel thing with it, but the game wasn't very interactive or fun. In one scene, we pretended to be mobsters from the 1920's, but we recorded the scene in a restaurant that just so happened to be playing the Beatles on the jukebox. That's one thing I'll always regret.

I had a choice to be like Mcgoohan and start yelling at people and chewing them out for quality issues, but I don't think it would have helped, and it was a class so I couldn't fire people who didn't make the stuff the way I wanted. Plus they tended to get real defensive about things, sooo not ready for an actual game company. So instead I sort of mentally retreated, became apathetic and let them do their own thing. It didn't turn out to be a very good game, but at the end, at least I felt like nobody hated me for being a bad boss.

I ended up settling for second best so we could finish the project on time. I think I preserved some friendships that continue to this day, if they don't read this blog, but I wasn't at all proud of the finished product. I wouldn't show that multimedia product to any company that I expected to get a job from. Didn't want to tell our professor what I really thought, probably best that I never did. 

I think this got me into the mindset, like Mcgoohan, that "If you want the job right, you gotta do it yourself." Unfortunately, that mentality makes you overworked. 

In the end, I've decided that I don't want to produce video games or movies, because I can't trust the staff and don't know how to delegate. It's much easier to write a book, or make art, and have a hundred percent control of my artistic vision, and don't have to worry about people who do a job in a way you don't like.

In retrospect, I think I should have just done sort of a sesame Street thing with puppets and limit the computer game and 3d rendering elements so we could have great video and more fun and finish the project faster. Maybe touch things up with the extra time and put in computer effects in at the last minute, if the teacher required it for a grade.