Your studio begins its life in the 1920s, so at first you’ll be producing
very short silent pictures. The movies that you produce will look like they came
from the current era your studio is in, so your silent pictures will be a little
jerky and there will be a lot of scratches on the film. These silent shorts are
pretty humorous and come across as either prop comedy or performance art, and
quite often as a mix of both. As time goes by technology improves and your
movies will eventually have sound, color, and a finer film grain, and you’ll
start to have longer running films as well.
 |
| Quiet on the set! |
As the game progresses you’ll have more control over the creative process of
producing your movies. First you’ll be able to begin hiring your own
screenwriters which will not only result in better quality scripts, but will
also let you specify the genre for your script. A little while later you’ll have
access to new building that will let you build the movie scripts yourself. This
is where the game really gets interesting. You are can select your film’s genre
and then the type of scenes that you want to add to your movie. For example, you
may open with a shot on your Western set of two actors riding in on horses or to
have an actor enter a bank while holding a gun. You then continue to pick and
choose scenes from the game’s extensive palette until you are satisfied with the
length of the film and the story you’ve told. All of the scenes are preset for
you, but you do have some control over them such as choosing their location or
the degree of violence to show. All of your work is more of a means to satisfy
your own creative desires more than anything else. You can put together a
nonsensical mismatch of scenes and have the movie perform well or pour your
heart into your own mini-epic (complete with dialogue that you’ve recorded
yourself and inserted into the movie) and have it flop – the game determines
each movie’s success with a very formulaic approach that weighs in a number of
factors such as the talent of your stars and the quality of your sets.
Most sim games that you play require you to really work hard to stay in the
black. With The Movies I never really grappled all that much with financial
problems as I always seemed to have enough money in the bank to do what I needed
to do. Instead, the major limiting factor on your mega-studio dreams is finding
people to hire. Yes, in an industry that just about everyone on this planet has
at one time or another fantasized about being a part of, you are left scrambling
to find people willing to direct and star in your movies. To hire new staff and
talent you have to wait for applicants to literally show up on your doorstep. If
there’s no one waiting in line to get a job at your studio, then you’re
completely out of luck. The situation can easily become desperate as your one or
two chronically overworked directors begin to refuse to work and you’re left
with no one to direct your films. At first I found myself wishing that I could
grab someone off the street and give them a picture to direct or a film in which
to star, which is a problem that I doubt any movie studio execs have to face. I
often became so desperate that I would raid my own cleaning staff to find a warm
body to stick in the director’s chair.
« Page 1 of 3 · Page 3 of 3 »
