For our first, and hopefully of many to come, machinima interviews, I was lucky to get a hold of Zukan. Now many have heard of Zukan and his work but not a lot of people have ever talked very long with him. So we tied him to a chair for a few hours, gave him a sandwich and settled in to ask the questions we have wanted answered for awhile.

 

 

JoeIce: Name, Alias, Age, Location, and if possible, National Insurances number and Credit Card details?

 

Johan Törnlund, Zukan, 20, Sweden, National Insurances number unavailable at this time, try again later.

 

JoeIce: You first popped up on my radar, almost three years ago with the release of Vendetta teaser. So I have to ask, what got you interested in Machinima?

 

Zukan : So basically, I watched a bunch of halo videos on the net and I came across these "films" that actually had some sort of story to tell. Not just your ordinary trick videos and such. Having some experience (or rather experimenting) in live-action short films, I thought it would be cool to try making my own machinima. This was around the release of Halo 2, and on top of that I had just found the "Blind skull" on campaign, you can probably figure out the rest.

 

JoeIce: Getting the nitty gritty out the way. You released a fantastic trailer for you series ‘Vendetta’, that a lot may say “Changed how some of us view machinima”. What was your thinking behind creating the trailer and what happened for you to cancel the series?

 

Zukan: I wish I could go back in time and say "Hey! Look at this FAKE trailer I made" but I was a stubborn little thing back then who didn’t plan very far ahead. Vendetta was this epic remake of one of my very first machinima films "Elite Fight". EF was around 1 min long and had these two elites running around shooting at stuff. I wanted to flesh it out into a much longer film and so the idea behind Vendetta came to life. I think that’s also the reason for the failure that was to come. I’m used to making short films, not feature length stuff. And normally one would finish the entire movie before releasing a trailer, but I was so excited to show the world what I had done so far. So I just took my favourite clips from the early recordings and turned it into a trailer. Now this wasn’t a small trailer but rather a... Here it comes; SHORT FILM. And so when I was going to continue on with the real thing, I realized that I just wanted to move along. It felt as if Vendetta was already finished, I just wasn’t prepared to throw myself at such a big project at that time. And to be honest, I didn’t think the story justified the amount of effort and time it would take to create the entire film. I mean it downright sucked. Two elites fighting? That’s deep...

 

 

JoeIce: I’ll get this stupid question out the way too. Will we ever see Vendetta reborn?

 

Zukan: Yes. As a matter of fact, I’m going to announce the sequel trailer exclusively for this interview. A few things have changed since the last Vendetta trailer. This time the trailer will be 10 min long instead of 5, and feature double the amount of explosions and zombies. Also more dialogue that has nothing to do with anything, but sounds extremely cool when synched with euro beats and evil looking characters walking in slow-motion. Mark my words, this thing will go down in machinima history with its super cool editing and jaw dropping ending... In other words, no.

 

JoeIce: A lot of people know you for Vendetta, but before you made the trailer that blew us away, you made ‘Mickey Ran Away’ which, I have to say, was amazing. When and why did you make the video?

 

Zukan: That was actually a birthday present for a friend of mine on this awesome forum with awesome dudes hanging around. I thought it would be fun to make them a film. It was back in 2005 and was the second machinima I made, but I never thought it would be such a big deal. A lot of people seemed to like it.

 

JoeIce: You recently won the ’Judges’ Award’ from halo.bungie.org ‘Zune Contest’ for your video, ‘Be Human’. For it you won a prototype helmet for the Halo 3 Legendary Edition (without the discs). One, I’d like to ask, what were your thoughts behind creating the video and two, what have you done with the Helmet?

 

Zukan: That’s funny cause just this other day I saw our neighbours cat strolling around with the helmet STILL on top of its head after all these months... Yeah. Be human you say? It actually came to me around one week before the deadline of the contest (Yikes!). I was just listening to some Yoko Kanno (amazing composer by the way songs and due to some unexplainable divine intervening while browsing HBO, the song "Be Human" started playing and it just hit me. As you may know if you’ve seen the video, the story is directly associated to the song. It had a unique story touching upon the difference between Artificial Intelligence and Human beings, in a very innocent, almost child-like way. I felt it would be very interesting if adapted to film and the challenge of turning it into a machinima made it even more appealing.

 

 

JoeIce: When you won the award, Louis Wu said that it was ‘one of those films that machinima makers should watch as a model’, how does that make you feel, that a lot of new up-coming machinima makers are now looking at your work as an example of ‘What to do’?

 

Zukan: I wasn’t expecting to win anything when I saw what other entries I was up against. Everyone had put just as much work into their films as I did, so it caught me completely off-guard when they announced the winners. I’m glad to have had at least some sort of influence on other machinima makers, but that they’re being used as "models" for future work... I really don’t think of it like that. In the end I just make the kind of films I like and hopefully, other people enjoy them too.