Untitled.
Imagine waking up one morning, your mind full of the ideas that you will accomplish in the day. You head down to see your parents who greet you with the warmest of hugs and salutations. Your father then leaves to run errands, and you stay home with your mom to help with chores, or whatever she may need help with. Later in the day you hear menacing sounds of machine guns rumbling through your home, and then a sudden boom of hundreds of tons of TNT being dropped into your city, before you know it, you are waking up in a bomb shelter, confused as to what happened, who was involved and if the rest of your family is okay. When you are finally allowed to go back to the city, it not longer exists. It is a familiar area, but there are no buildings, no people, just rubble, and silence.
For this project I chose to do a Minecraft machinima to display a narrative of a family who is having a 'normal' morning, and by the end of the day, their lives are completely turned around and the most tragic and devastating of events has occurred: their city has been attacked by terror bombing. The previous story, albeit sad, may have just been a story to the general audience. Though for many people was a real life occurrence. An occurrence of the past as well as events that still happen today. This video was modeled after the bombing of Guernika. It was a Monday when it happened, which is considered Market Day, in which many people went into town to do their shopping. The Spanish, and Germans chose this day to terror bomb a city that had nothing to do with them, because there was a large population of people in the middle of town that could be annihilated for no specific reason to them. They also attacked hospitals, train stations, and armories so there was no way to combat back, or escape. In the end, the people of Guernika were confused because there was no reason for them to be attacked, which there was not. Terror bombing very often is just aimed at civilians which have nothing to do with the attackers. Those who survived had to continue living their lives, even though their loved ones has disappeared in the rubble and devastation.
I tried to show the confusion between the mother and daughter when they arrived and their father, and husband was nowhere to be found. Though, I was not only trying to convey devastation, my main purpose in this project was to take something that was innocent, and usually enjoyable (Minecraft), and make it seem real by changing the tone and mood of the atmosphere. Also, Minecraft is not usually an incredibly personal software or game for most audiences, making my main idea. Furthermore, I wanted to bring the idea of the distance between our understanding of events that occurred. As people in 2014, almost 2015, when we learn about events that happened in the passed such as the bombing of Guernika, or The Holocaust, it is almost a story to us. We know that it happened, but there is no connection to it, making it increasingly difficult to understand. A person must do a good amount of research on something, hear first hand experiences, and think about the events to feel an immense of emotion toward these circumstances.
Admittedly, this distance is incredibly frustrating when one wants to truly understand past events, or even events that are occurring now, but the distance is too far to feel a connection. Though, I feel that it is important to continue learning about these things, and study them in order to prevent issues in the future.
