Created for my Intercultural Seminar – Lost and Found: Translating and Adapting the Spanish Comedia class. This video was created for my final project where we were tasked to adapt one of the comedias we had read that trimester. I chose Life is a Dream written by Pedro Calderón and used Halo 5: Guardians to make a trailer for a machinima/sci-fi adaptation. Below is the reflection and summary of a full adaptation I wrote for the video.
Halo: Life is a Dream
For my adaptation, I decided to create a Halo machinima, a story-based video created using video game assets. I only made a write up of a summary for the short film, and a trailer since making a full machinima exactly how I would have wanted to would have taken too much time and resources I don’t have right now (i.e. animations).
Since my machinima is a Halo machinima I decided to mesh the two stories together. I kept the base story the same, Segismund being locked in a tower, but changed almost everything else. SEGIS being tucked away in a tower makes sense since he acted out against his fellow soldiers since the UNSC wouldn’t be able to tuck him away anywhere else. The reason behind the major overhaul is mostly because this takes place in 2558 and many of the honor and superstitious reasons behind actions wouldn’t fly. I changed Astolfo and Rosaura’s relationship because of this, keeping the fact that they know each other, but making a new reason for Rose to be mad at him. I completely removed most of the father-daughter relationship between Rose and Clotaldo since it didn’t fit anymore, even though the scene with Clotaldo saving Rose is important to the original. It didn’t fit with the goal of this story since I wanted to focus on SEGIS’ mindset, and as such had to be left out. I also decided to add more to the end with SEGIS, Astolfo, and Stella ending up working together to complete the mission where SEGIS had originally wanted to go alone.
Another important change I should quickly mention is why only SEGIS and Rose have a major name change. Segismund is the only name that didn’t feel like something out of Halo even though there are several different cultures prominent in the series. It fit a lot better as a codename instead. As for Rose, she felt like a more relaxed character who would go by her first name whenever possible whereas all the other characters use their names as last names.
As I said, my machinima takes place in 2558 in the Halo universe. Humanity is just finishing a war with the Covenant, a super advanced race they barely managed to beat and is pretty much starting one with the Prometheans, other alien constructs while dealing with the Covenant fragments. This, of course, leads to a very large modernization since it takes place in the future. You’ve got space travel, aliens, power armor, plasma weapons, you name it.
There are three places the machinima would take place. The tower SEGIS is repairing, the HQ where Admiral Basil is stationed, and the battleground/battleground simulation. I couldn’t really include the HQ in my trailer since it would need to be animated, but the other two were there. My trailer was all game clips, but a full machinima would need to include animation as well. This would be to have non-Spartan characters since you can only have Spartans in-game.
I decided to do this first because the line “She said that to me once, about being a machine,” came to mind when we first read Fever/Dream and that lead me to draw connections between Halo and Life is a Dream. There are quite a few instances where Halo’s ONI behaved very similarly to King Basil with the whole ‘for the greater good’ mentality.
I feel this adaptation is unique because I don’t see many people making machinimas of Spanish comedias. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comedia machinima. A few comedies, maybe a tragedy or two, but no comedias. I feel like there is a lot of potential in videos like machinimas since it draws in a larger audience that might not be interested in the summary of a story but interested in the video game.
My central message is how man and machine can work together, you just need to do it right. Humanity can be greater than machine. I felt this is an important message because our fear of monsters has changed. It’s no longer beast-men, but machine-men. The comedia had people thinking about how monsters can be good, and I wanted to do the same thing.
I think I learned how comedias can be connected to things we never really realized. When I walked into this class, I never would have thought I’d be connecting it to Halo 4. Being able to do this, it helped add another perspective to the story and I feel being able to connect things to our daily lives is one of the most important parts of understanding something.
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