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Meet the Guys Behind the Minecraft Documentary

16.06.2011
Earlier this year, a group of indie filmmakers set out to . The filmmakers had an idea and some footage, but no funding. But thanks to a wildly successful fundraising , Minecraft: The Story of Mojang is now in full production. I recently had the chance to speak with to Asif Siddiky, director of photography for 2 Player Productions about how they got started, where Story of Mojang is going, and how their new project began.

Two Player Productions (2PP) is a Portland-based production company that creates documentaries on video games and gamer culture. 2PP first got noticed with , a 2008 documentary about the underground Chip Music scene where artists create new music using old GameBoys and other outmoded video game tech, and , the yearly gathering in New York.

Reformat the Planet rocketed the team to geek prominence, and led to work with Web-comic juggernaut Penny Arcade on the first season of their PATV video series. The idea for Story of Mojang soon followed.

"We had just finished our run on the first season of the Penny Arcade series. And we were working with Sony on behind-the-scenes stuff for various games. We decided we were going to produce a series of documentary shorts for various games and were looking to make a pilot."

The 2PP guys were all big fans of Minecraft, an addictive sandbox game that lets you build just about anything, which was just starting to become a hit last summer as they were kicking around ideas. They soon decided Minecraft would be perfect for their pilot.

"Paul emailed [Minecraft creator] Notch out of the blue to see if we could come to Sweden, they wouldn't have to pay anything we were going to pay out of pocket. We went out there for about a week and it became obvious there was a lot more story here."