New Pro-Gaming Documentary: A Word with the Creators of Frag

Yeah, yeah, I get it, The Dark Knight is going to blow my mind.  In the meantime, another tale of unlikely heroism has got my attention.  A gritty, in-depth story of the lives of professional gamers, from the current stars to the dark horses to the fresh faces, Frag will, no doubt, itself blow a few minds.

Meet Mike Pasley, film artist and Director of Frag, and Judd Saul, Director of Photography with Cohesion Productions and the Executive Producer of Frag.

How did the idea for Frag come about?
Judd: Well, we’re a film and video production company, and we wanted to do a documentary, and we were going through, “What do we like to do? What really needs to be covered?” We were watching TV, and we noticed that professional video gaming was getting more recognition, and we were like, this is it. This is a documentary that we need to do. I think this is a story that needs to be told that we could accomplish.

Some of your filmmakers’ descriptions state that this is their “first film” – so, what sorts of things were they doing before, and how did they all come together?

Judd: We’ve been doing work for hire, did some music videos, things like that, and we made the decision that if we want to be successful, we need to create our own movies. Frag was our first go-around. I was looking for people in my area that could help me, and I ran into Mike Pasley, who’s the Director on the film. He’d done a short film before called Pavlov’s Bathroom, and he’s in the area, he looked very promising, and that’s why I decided to pull him on to direct Frag.

Mike: Before I was working on this project, I was doing unrelated things. I like photographic art and things like that. As far as everyone being first-time filmmakers, it’s just that the company was doing more commercial products and things, and everyone was working in unrelated fields prior to coming to this project, other than Judd.

In the National Geographic documentary on professional gamers from 2005, a narrator with a British accent observes Zerg troop movements like they’re gazelles. How do you conduct yourself differently from that kind of detached observation?

Mike: We’ve been working on Frag and determining what the story was, and how we’re going to tell it, and the device we really wanted to use was focusing on the player. It’s not as much a biographical type observation about video games; it’s focused on the players and the struggles they go through. So of course, the best way to tell that story is to let the players tell it themselves. A lot of interviews, a pretty hands-off approach as far as narration. We do have a narrator in the documentary, but it’s a very sparse use of narration, really told by the gamers themselves.

Judd: And we dove into the culture of the professional video gamers. We befriended them, we lived with them, we followed them around. The story’s told from pure gamer perspective.

Could you tell me about the different kinds of people you’ve met while making the film and what it was like working with them?

Judd: We’ve met a good variety of people, people from all over the world, different gamers from all over the world, people that make video games, video game league owners, and we’ve met a couple of celebrities along the way, like Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island, and Mike personally met Gene Simmons from Kiss.

Mike:  To answer your question about what the different people were like and our relationship with them, we really, well I should speak for myself – being someone who isn’t involved in gaming wasn’t really an issue, so it was really easy to get along with hardcore gamers and the professional players. It really wasn’t something that was a roadblock in getting along with them and having personal relationships. I think it’s important to not become too close friends with people so you have some perspective on people you’re interviewing and talking with, but since we’ve finished the documentary, there have been a lot of relationships, we’ve kept up with various players and different league owners. Overall, gamers are totally normal people, they just have an interest that maybe seems strange to some people.

Speaking of people from all over the world… You tell SK Gaming that you had limited exposure to Asian gaming. How prominently do you feature other countries?

Mike: The idea of gaming, gaming in Korea and the Eastern world is obviously far more advanced than in North America and Europe, so we tended to stray away from telling that story just because it’s dramatically different to tell. It’s tough to work that in without becoming too unfocused. As far as the players in North America and Europe, Germany and Russia and all over, we talked to a lot of people of course, but because of travel and budget restraints we couldn’t fly to every country we’d like to, but Judd was able to go to ESWC and talk to a lot of foreign teams. The reporter Carmac, who writes for SK now, is a major figure in the documentary – he is of course from Poland. We talked to a lot of players from Britain, South America, Sweden, so I think there’s a pretty heavy influence from all sorts of other countries – again we’re a company based in America so it’s probably more American centric than not, but it definitely wasn’t something we did purposely, to exclude other countries. I think you’ll be surprised at the blend of countries and nationalities in the documentary.

How did your perspective change?  Any stereotypes debunked or, perhaps, confirmed?

Judd: Learning how much these guys dedicate and practice, and they treat it like a sport. They are athletes. They really train and practice just like real athletes and they take that level of training to play the game. There are people that are definitely better than others that can’t be beaten unless you train like that, and there are people who have certain ability above all others to be able to play it as a sport.

Mike: Another thing as far as stereotypes and the ones we saw that were real or not real, I think the biggest one we found is that gamers really are like everyone else. They act like other kids of their age. Instead of being really interested in professional basketball or football or any other interest of someone in that age range, they just really are into video games. So they still have friends, still have social activities, just, most of their social activities revolve around gaming, so their friends aren’t necessary other people in their school, or in their city, they’re people from all around the world, which in some ways is more beneficial for becoming more social and learning how to communicate, in a lot of cases communicating with people that speak different languages and live in completely different places. When they’re around each other, they get along great and act just like anyone else their age, so I that was something we found that was very inaccurate as far as stereotypes go.

What did you hope to convey before you began, and what do you think you’ll end up conveying?

Mike: When we set in to make a documentary, the idea was to make a documentary about gaming. We didn’t have a certain agenda, to show that gaming is great or to show that gaming is negative or anything else, we just tried to have an indifferent perspective and to let the story tell itself. We feel very strongly that Frag is an honest documentary that really shows professional gaming industry for what it is – both the good and the bad – and I would hope that the parents of aspiring gamers or anybody that’s grown up in this age with video games would find some interest in it. It’s a fairly universal story of struggling to reach goals. Of course, people that are very interested in gaming are probably going to get more out of it because they’re going to have a lot of background knowledge coming into it, but the thing I’d wanna say about it is: don’t stray away from it just because it’s about gaming, because it’s about a much larger story than that.