Monster Camp

Now sure if any of you are familiar with this documentary, but I just stumbled across the trailer and thought I'd share it with the rest of you.

www.apple.com/trailers/independent/monstercamp/trailer/

Enjoy!

Saw it earlier. I like the angle to a point. There seems to be one too many sob stories in it and it comes off as a hallmark moment. I'm not saying one or two, but there seems to be enough tiny violin to play Pachebel's Canon five times over.

The movie is geared for people who are outside looking in and takes abit of semi-obscure knowledge to know what a RPG is.

I should email this to some of my friends who don't understand what I do,but that's a really cool video.

While I respect the Monster Camp folks for what they are doing, I feel that they are taking the general gaming documentary concept too far. If you are interested in seeing a somewhat more tasteful rendition of the gamer documentary, that focuses more on the positive effect of gaming on people's lives, take a look into Darkon (www.darkonthemovie.com/) which manages to tell the story of larping and it's effects without coming across as "campy" (no pun intended).

Monster camp unfortunately falls into the same kind of larp documentary that larps produce of themselves, trying to bring people directly into the quirky idiom that is the LARP community. Darkon, meanwhile, draws you in through the real lives of the people who play and tackles the deeper psychological elements that make LARPing such a wonderful pastime.

As to the actual cinematography, Monster Camp is clearly produced on exclusively digital cams with relatively novice camera work, which, as is clear from the reviews, makes the material "endearing" but does not convey the cinematic and epic feeling that the players get by experiencing the game.

It seems, in the end, that Monster Camp is a heart-warming story about how a group of socially side-lined people have found a community which accepts them and the social dynamic created behind the scenes at a LARP. I hope that they don't focus too much on the snarky attitudes of some of the players or the knitty gritty explanations of how the larp functions, for their sake, because their camera style combined with the oft dry rules material could very well kill the audience and only further inspire the typical trolling that LARPing already receives thanks to youTube.

[/rant]