Concept

Marshmallow Duel explores the classic ‘fish out of water’ concept in an amusing way. In a lighthearted, comedic style, it explores the notion of misplaced identity; a virtual character’s struggle to exist in the real world, and a real person’s misadventures in the virtual realm. While it uses a deliberately unrealistic style coupled with comical acting methods to convey ridiculousness, on a conceptual level it attempts to highlight the vast chasms of misunderstanding often prevalent between different cultures. The message here being that one person’s perception of their reality has no meaning when placed within another’s.

The central characters used to convey this notion of displacement will be quite different from each other, representative of the differences between their conflicting environments. On the one hand the protagonist is an everyday ‘real life’ character, so to speak. He embodies everything viewers can take for granted and relate to about their everyday lives. His comfortable position within our reality gives him a peaceable and contemplative outlook on things. He is, simply put, an average person.

The film’s antagonist, however, is quite different. He embodies the attributes common to the ‘video game’ world. He is two-dimensional, pixelated, and always searching for battles. Because of this, he is not much a great evil as a victim of circumstance. His bloodthirsty, deterministic way of life brought upon by his situation dictates that he can only view the universe through eyes of rage and destruction.

Being based around the game Marshmallow Duel, the film quite obviously draws a lot from it. This game not only features as a part of the story in the film, but is inextricably linked to the film on various conceptual layers. In the game, players die by falling into the pit of liquid marshmallow at the bottom of the screen. This marshmallow represents a duality of life and death. It represents life as a primordial soup, a common symbol of our evolution, and death, as it is lethal for the characters in the game to touch and is where they reside when dead.

The film attempts to represent the concept of evolution in a plethora of ways. At the start we view two different worlds, the game world and the real world. As the film progresses, parts of these two worlds are interchanged, with the characters from each worlds learning to adapt and evolve in their opposing worlds. Eventually one character returns to his world but finds it tainted and changed. The human character comes to realize that the world is evolving along with him. The concept of this evolving world is an interesting contrast to the reality of the game world, which in reality is a very static environment with no possibility of change. The human character in his mutated world must again learn to adapt and fight, in a struggle that parallels evolution’s ‘survival of the fittest’.

This struggle also references the game in a more obvious way, that is the constant presence of violence and fighting. Upon starting to play Marshmallow Duel, it is assumed that the player realizes that the sole purpose is to fight and kill the other opponent. The film takes this violent deterministic idea and highlights it, intending to bring into question the constant need for, and assumption of violence in video games. It could be seen that the violence at the core of games is a natural and necessary aspect to have, as nature itself is primarily about survival of the fittest and life is purely a constant struggle to survive. However a more popular point of view would be that humans are above such an existence, and violence is something to be repressed and avoided, that violence in video games merely propagates outdated ideals. In the film we intend only to bring the question up for debate, rather than force an opinion on anyone. The film has no didactic lessons in itself, it merely hopes to ask questions and open a dialogue rather than enforce answers.

While these above concepts explain the various intentions driving the film, there is an important notion of context, grounding the concept and giving it a starting point.

The concepts and ideas of the film where developed and evolved through a lot of personal thought and discussion. The original and central element of the film, that is the game Marshmallow Duel was the first thing decided on and was always intended to be utilized as the main plot device. This element spawned all other themes and concepts used in the film. The reason we wanted to use the game in the film was to raise awareness of it.

The game is very fun and addictive in its own simple way, and it concentrates on extreme and maximized fun, as any game should. It was an independent and almost unheard of game, made at a time when immensely big budget games with flashy graphics concentrated on technology with extreme and maximized eye candy. Real fun however, was sitting somewhere in the background.

To us the game represents a counter-culture symbol of triumph. Although the author of the game may never have intended it, the game looks in the face of a new and booming entertainment industry which is quickly heading in the commercialistic direction, hailing to the all mighty dollar, and asks the simple question ‘why?’ What is the point of all that hype and Hollywood bullshit when a simple yet addictive game can hold the attention of just as many gamers as its big-budget counterparts. It is art for art’s sake rather than the modern trend of art for money’s sake. For us it represents a joke in the face of this cash driven culture and it is entertaining to us to aim to raise the profile of this unheard of game. Although this is perhaps an impossible task, it is the impossibility of making this game meaningful and a landmark in the historical landscape of the electronic entertainment industry that drives our concept.

With this context in mind, it was decided this film would be an ideal outlet for some kind of recognition and awareness of the game.

The evolution concepts inherent in the film also coincide with the evolution of this gaming industry. In the industry, Marshmallow Duel is essentially meaningless as it has no relevance to anyone that ‘counts’. We tried to recreate this situation in an abstract way by including as in the film two characters who themselves are irrelevant, meaningless and pointless. These two characters are attacked by Mowbray, our antagonist, and wear strange costumes and have strange behaviour. We expect that the film’s audience would react in such a way to view these characters as unrelated and meaningless, however their very presence should indicate that there is meaning somewhere, to someone. Although a meaning may not be clearly visible, insignificant things often mean a lot to some people. This idea reflects the way Marshmallow Duel is viewed by the greater gaming community. This aspect of the film exists to raise questions about meaning. We want people to adopt the idea that anything that seems inconsequential will quite often have meaning somewhere and will often take on a whole new meaning through the eyes of a different person. This also coincides with the views of the central characters of the film. They view each other’s worlds through unaccustomed eyes and they must adapt to a new and different world full of meaning if they wish to survive.

Aside from the initial peer audience of the movie in class, the film is targeted at a web delivery, to become perhaps even a centre-piece for a website devoted to the game. Hopefully the film will be interesting enough to be a draw card to the website to increase awareness of the game. It also makes available the opportunity to communicate the other concepts inside the film to a varied and unique web audience.

Treatment

Marshmallow Duel is primarily about the displacement of a real world character and his virtual counter-part, and what happens to them when they are thrust unwittingly into each other’s surroundings. On a variety of layers it also conveys ideas about human cultures, evolution, and perceptions of reality through different points of view. This is all as outlined in the concept.

It is supposed to be a somewhat self-satirising film, and in most areas involves unrealistic situations and combines intentionally over-emphasised acting and special effects to create an atmosphere of a clichéd science-fiction action adventure which the audience can relate to.

We attempt to play this atmosphere for comic effect and also comment on the genre which we are essentially making fun of. The film however does not sit snugly into this cliché style genre. It draws from a variety of different sources and often in a self-conscious way highlights and emphasizes the common and overused gimmicks of a lot of similarly themed films. This is not to say however that we look down on such films, we are simply conscious of the overused techniques and we are using the fact that an audience will be familiar to them to make a joke.

The film draws its lighthearted key from the often whimsical nature of the Marshmallow Duel game itself, and the unlikely situation of the plot. Because of this unlikeliness and strange juxtaposition of game imagery with real world footage, we knew the film would only be suited to a deliberately humourous approach. We also wanted to take a different direction from our previous film which had a very serious tone.

We decided to include a slapstick influence to coincide with the cartoonish and goofy looking computer-game characters. The contrast of the animated characters and real world characters also provides an awkwardness which serves to highlight the divide between worlds which is central to the concept.

The start of the film introduces the characters and the worlds they exist in. Through a series of wacky mishaps, the two main characters swap worlds. Amidst outrageously tacky special effects, the protagonist is transported into the computer, and the antagonist is transported out, into the real world, setting the stage for the middle of the story. This use of special effects and the computer-world theme reaches back to 1980s style low budget science fiction movies.

The middle of the film shows the characters struggling to adapt and get used to their new worlds. There is a graphic match to polarise the similarities and differences between the character’s situations. When the protagonist explores the game world he gets attacked by his opponent and flung to the ground. In the following scene, the antagonist, who is now exploring his new found world, is hit by a car and does a roll in the style of the animations in the game.

The interest and conflict present at this stage of the film comes from the violent nature of the virtual world of video games spilling over into the real world (and vice versa). The real world protagonist is at first pacifistic in his actions in the virtual world. This approach, however, does not work for him, and so he must adapt to the violent nature of the video game world and its inhabitants. In contrast, the virtual antagonist’s transportation to the real world leaves him unprepared for benevolent acts toward him. He soon begins fighting those around him, and thus they must defend themselves. It should be noted that both characters are fighting beings who they perceive to be enemies, a perception which stems from their inability to cope with the sudden shift in their surroundings.

The film then features the protagonist being freed from the virtual world, moments prior to an imminent death, to rejoin reality. The protagonist is now resolved, he has come through a journey and is prepared to deal with the results of the two worlds colliding. There is a traditional showdown and battle, referencing with a few shots the classic western style duel. This duel is the real world equivalent of a ‘marshmallow’ duel and takes place in hot midday sun to show it’s obvious High Noon inspiration. This section of the film uses a lot of compositing, different sprites from the game overlaid into the real world to show the mixture of the two universes. The camera positioning and character movements in this section are also set to resemble the in-game imagery. For example, front on geometric wide shots of the two enemies is a visual cue from the side-scroller look of the game. The film ends with the game character being banished, but the aftermath of the collision of the two universes is left open-ended.

In a way, this ending is essentially a nemesis-oriented showdown between the protagonist and antagonist. Because the two different worlds are unable to coexist, one character must be banished or destroyed. The alienated antagonist’s views, so different from those of the protagonist’s world, label him an outcast. His inability to fit into the protagonist’s reality ensures his doom.

The soundscapes of the film are accentuated by beeps and sounds from the game itself. When viewing a film the audience is closely tied to the reality of the film through the sounds present. The use of unnatural beeps from the game are used to distance the audience from their aural sense of reality, and make them question the reality of the computer-game world presented to them.

Marshmallow duel is meant to be a very casual, stylized film that references and combines a variety of different styles and aesthetics, and at the same time, satirise those very stylistic techniques. This confusing mixture of style is a form which we believe suits the content of the film, the concept of misplaced identity, and the confusion which results.