The Original 'As Real as Your Life'

I'm working on a new portfolio site this week and have been dusting off some stuff from the archives. I thought it would be fun to post the 9 minute student film version of As Real as Your Life, which the later was remade after the film picked up an LA producer. I'm also including a review of the film from the Ivy Film festival, written by Josh Bauchner. It's still my favorite write up of the film and perfect captures what I was trying to achieve with it. For more information about the new version of the film visit the film's own site.

Shooting Digital Insurgents
by Josh Bauchner

By far the best entry I saw was a documentary by Michael Highland (University of Pennsylvania) entitled As Real as Your Life. The video, tagged: "I am a videogame addict. Here is my story," follows a pseudo-first person narrative about how the director's love of video games compensates for his otherwise lacking "real" life. In 10 short minutes, Highland traces a personal history of video games, offering up plenty of screen shots juxtaposed with Waking Life-esque "meaningful" questions.

The project, one of the few truly multimedia-based entries takes other technologies (video game progress) not only as its content, but also as its form. The film combines a hodge-podge of scraggly hand-drawn PS2 controllers, split-screen digital video and computer graphics (with the protagonist mirroring the actions of the hero from GTA3), perfect soft laptop pop from Four Tet, and ambiguous night vision shots of "actual" combat. Such extension and integration of subject and object gives the multimedia project a credibility and complexity absent in many of the other films.

At the same time, this complexity leads to many questions and problems unanswered in the text itself: does Highland endorse continued progress in gaming? Does he believe games actually cause "real life" violence? Has the ambiguous didactic nature of his rhetorical questions already defeated any intended effect? Has he ever beaten Final Fantasy X with no cheats on Wizard level?

These problems arise mostly from the director taking upon a complex project, both technically and conceptually, and never reaching a final conclusion about the relation between video games and real life. Yet this failure is the mark of a film that is entirely devoted to and caught up in itself, a perfect drive towards aesthetic complexity and thematic relevance. Leaving any final solution to the video game quandary is both a consequence of time restrictions and insight into the intricacy of the issues surrounding the proliferation of hyper-real video games and digital images, as well their ubiquitous place in today's childhoods.