Shooting a Movie in a Fantasy World Is Not All Fun and Game

(Courtesy Voig.com/Full Stealth Films - Courtesy Full Stealth Films)

"It's much more like a real film shoot than I ever thought it was going to be," Taylor said. "You don't have as much control as you do when you're filming in the real world."

This being an action-packed game realm, there are a lot of brawls, started both by other players and the game's computer-controlled monsters. There's no real way to rope off an area when they want to film a scene, so Taylor and his team have production assistants on patrol, logged on as powerful characters, whenever they're trying to film.

If a monster comes near, the PA's job is to kill it, if possible. If another Warcraft player is about to stumble onto the set, that PA tries to steer him away, with bribes if necessary. The crew has paid out about 10,000 pieces of virtual gold in bribes so far. (Entrepreneurial Warcraft fans could sell that amount for around $500 in real-world currency.) When a scene calls for extras, the team hires from a pool of WoW players they know and pays a standard rate of $200 (real-world dollars) per day.

Victor Reyes, the film's producer, had never played the game before and didn't know what to make of it at first. The project has had its frustrating moments.

"The crew doesn't usually start running off after their mortal enemy and shooting fireballs when you're filming in Times Square," he said. "It took a while for us to figure out how to make this work."

All around, Loiacono said, the project has turned out to be more work than he anticipated. "For every five minutes of scene you probably have five hours of video capture and five hours of editing," he said.

For all the effort, MMOvie's makers said they don't have any game plan for making any money directly off the project. Blizzard, the company that makes World of Warcraft, has embraced homemade fan videos such as this -- so long as no one's making a profit off the results.

Funny thing is, Taylor said, he's not as much of a Warcraft fan as he used to be, after spending endless hours lining up shots for the film and editing the results.

"It kind of burns you out," said Taylor. "When you're playing the game for work, you don't want to play it for fun anymore. Almost everyone in our crew has stopped playing it for fun."