Star Wars Minecraft Trench Scene

          Minecraft is a game that has been receiving a lot of attention lately in the gaming world. Essentially, it is a sandbox-style game where players can build anything they desire out of textured, pixelated cubes in a 3D world. Gamers have been becoming increasingly creative with their Minecraft constructions where the possibilities are really endless.
          On the other hand there is Star Wars....and does that really need an explanation? But who can forget the famous scene where Luke Skywalker flies his X-Wing through the Death Star's trenches, inevitably blowing it up? I for one, cannot, and remember watching it as a child thinking it was one of the coolest, most exciting movie scenes I've ever seen. Dodging TIE-Fighters while green and red lasers zoom across the screen couldn't be more exhilarating for a young, adolescent boy, especially with the introduction of Darth Vader and his special TIE-Fighter.
          Well, a man that goes by the alias "Paradise Decay" used Minecraft to replicate this infamous scene in the form of machinima. Machinima is using real-time computer graphics rendering engines to create cinematic productions. Basically using a video games graphics and content to create movies. This is much more creative and difficult than other ways of movie-making because the artist does not have as much control as other forms of media. Games set limitations on what can be controlled or changed within, so part of machinima is the artist's ability to work around these boundaries and find ways to produce a film using other methods.

          Paradise Decay uses the original audio from the movie and overlays it on Minecraft scenes to make a pretty good adaptation of great filmmaking back in the day. While the work isn't too visually appealing, what matters is the process behind it and the creativeness that was utilized to make this process work. Each scene consists of thousands of singular blocks that the artist had to create one-by-one to replicate each part of the scene. This can take numerous hours and days just to create a YouTube video that is less than 5 minutes long. There actually is an impressive amount of detail that isn't noticeable when looking at the grand spectrum of things but for taking this video for what it is, then you can see how much work was put into it. This is another example of the many ways computing and the arts can be combined and machinima has been growing steadily since it's birth and has many examples from all types of games.