Alberto Mielgo’s Search For Visual Poetry In His ‘Marathon’ Cinematic Short

Last month, game developer Bungie released a new cinematic short film set in the universe of Marathon, the studio’s highly anticipated sci-fi extraction shooter slated to release on consoles and PC this September.

Directed by Academy Award-winning animator Alberto Mielgo (The Windshield Wiper), the eight-minute short centers on a group of “runners,” futuristic mercenaries with minds housed inside bio-cybernetic bodies, exploring the ruins of an abandoned colony of a faraway planet known as Tau Ceti IV. Divided into seven vignettes, Mielgo’s film strikes a throughline between each of the game’s central themes: entropy, recursion, and the cyclical nature of synthetic life.

Cartoon Brew had the opportunity to speak with Mielgo about the origins behind the collaboration, why the philosophy of Marathon’s universe was a perfect fit for his artistic sensibilities, and what the future has in store for the maverick director.

Cartoon Brew: When did Bungie first approach you to direct a cinematic short set in the Marathon universe?

Alberto Mielgo: I think it was about a year ago, or perhaps a little bit more, maybe February [or] March, when there were the first conversations. I know that at first, they were sort of distributing a little bit of a presentation of what they wanted to do with some studios, and they sent it to us and, and I was really into it from the beginning. It was already an extended presentation of what they wanted to do, more or less. They didn’t want a typical cinematic.

I was very attracted by the story, and I was very attracted by the look. So I said, “I would like to do it, if you guys trust me on this.” I could do a script and present it to you within probably the next day. It triggered a lot of stimulation in my brain, and I was just very inspired by it. So I wrote a short treatment of what I would like to do based on a poem that I like, [Percy Bysshe Shelley’s] “Ozymandias,” which is a very famous and beautiful poem that actually works very well with the world. I presented it to them, they liked it, and we went ahead and did it. I don’t know if they were having conversations with other studios, but I said, ‘Look, we want to do it. I don’t want to compete against anybody, I just want us to have a good relationship.’ And that was it.

How closely did you and the team at Bungie work together on the short? Were you given free range to decide on the details of the script and dialogue, or did you consult at all with the narrative design team in honing the details of the script?

We were a very small team in these meetings, which included the heads of the creative teams for the game. Of course, they had some rules for the universe, which had me asking even more questions. I read about the previous games as much as possible, but I knew that this was a completely new take. It was a very nice relationship, where they allowed me to have a lot of creative freedom, and I think we had a little bit of a symbiosis, because they were developing a lot of ideas and I was bringing a lot of new ideas. There were scenarios for characters that I was bringing that they’d never thought of, and they were like, ‘Wow, this would be cool for something.”

So I think we were retrofitting each other in terms of creative exchange. I think they were very open, basically, to just develop their own world, and I think that both sides were creating and investigating this world and this universe together as we were developing the cinematic.

I rewatched some of your previous shorts and noticed a recurring throughline in your game-related work. In the Marathon cinematic, you used “Ozymandias” as a thematic bridge, and in your 2022 cinematic for Watch Dogs: Legion, you used a revised version of Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came.” What is it about poetry that resonates with you as an artist, and what inspired the choice of using “Ozymandias” for Marathon?

Well, I think that my work generally is very poetic, and I don’t want to sound pretentious, ambitious. I think that The Windshield Wiper was very much like a visual poem. “Jibaro” and all the other works I did for Love, Death & Robots, I think that they are very much like poems as well.

I think that poems are open to interpretation, and in the case of “Ozymandias,” the subject matter was very clear. It was very much about the futility of things and how nothing is going to last forever. And I think that when I read the script, I mean, the basis of the game is this colony that goes so far out and they put so much effort to go far away, as far as nobody else in humankind has ever gone before. And yet they fail, and nobody really knows what happened there. And there is a mystery there.

In “Ozymandias,” there’s a lot of reading between lines. That’s what I like about poems as well. There’s a lot of reading between lines, a lot of interpretation, and what happened there in the world of Marathon is still now a mystery. I suppose that the people, the gamers, are going to discover what happened there. But that’s the thing that really attracted me — how a huge colony that was in the golden era of humankind became extinct, and right now there is nothing there, and everything is very much abandoned. And now there are all these people; these “runners,” that are doing some sort of piracy there.

I think that the poem was very accurate to the world, and poetry sometimes is like music. To have it almost as a background sound, while you don’t necessarily need to recreate the images of the words. It’s almost like a soundtrack that you can hear. Maybe you want to listen to it on the second viewing, but it’s definitely there and it’s very much almost like music that drives you through the image.

It’s interesting that you compare it to music. I’ve seen a couple breakdowns of the Marathon short since its release, and one of them mentioned the prominent use of Bach’s “Adagio Concerto in D Minor” throughout the cinematic. Was that a song that Bungie chose for the short, or was that creative choice on your part?

Yeah, it was on my part. I wrote this script and I presented to them what I wanted to do, and it was very important for me that these characters were connected to a piece of music from the old era of humanity. You know, you could always say, ‘Okay let’s use rock and roll,’ or another kind of hit. But I thought it was a little bit more clear if it was a classical piece, something like from the second era of humans, let’s say like, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

We’re talking about the three ages of humankind here. So, let’s say, like the first is the age of cavemen. The second one, it could be the time where we have Bach’s “Adagio,” classical music, all the technology that comes later, and probably the third age of humankind could be considered the time of Marathon, the future and artificial intelligence. So I felt that it would be nice to choose a piece like “Adagio.”

I saw online there is a lot of analysis of the film, which is very interesting [laughs]. I’m not going to get into that, but I really like that people are interpreting the film their own way. Anytime that I read about films that I did, sometimes the people that spend time studying these films come up with ideas that I never thought about. Perhaps they are there because, subconsciously, I was putting them in there, or perhaps because they are like symbols that people can interpret one way or another. But I have a lot of fun reading the interpretations of the people who watch my films. Of course, there is an intention in the film. There is, like a lot of subjective symbology as well, but I like to leave it up to the audience to have their own interpretations, and, more importantly, their own feelings, when they watch the film.

One of the most intriguing sequences from the Marathon cinematic is the “grounding exercise,” where Glitch and later Void are asked a series of diagnostic questions about themselves. Some have theorized it was inspired by Blade Runner or even Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor. What can you tell me about that scene?

Originally, what they told which was very thought provoking — and this is a theory, of course, that comes from science and science fiction in general — was that if we are able to download our mind into a server, when you copy a hard disk, the size of the copies is always somewhat smaller. Most of the time, we are losing information on the way, and the more you download your mind into another vessel, that also applies. In this case, in the Marathon world, people start losing more and more memories with each upload and re-upload.

It’s the same concept of the hard drive. And I felt that was the most interesting part. When I read the whole treatment of the world, I thought that, Oh, I love this thing that the characters are almost like losing their memory, and who knows, later, in the distant future, they might become even closer to an artificial intelligence with no memories than to humans. And I thought that it was very interesting to create some sort of a custom, like a test that they do to these characters just to see how they are behaving, how are their levels of memory. And, of course, the most simple idea that I came up was showing them lucky charms. Like, I imagine that once you download your brain into the server, you have to bring a number of objects for these future tests. It’s a simple conversation.

Sometimes, in order to tell stories, it’s better to do it as simply as possible than to be too complex. And especially if you don’t have a narrator, you just need to show something that the audience can understand. But it’s very cool, because it’s very open to interpretation, especially for example the same photograph up there that is opening the conversation to the fans. I’m reading some theories, and some of them, they are extremely creative. Some of them are closer to my idea. But that’s what I like about science fiction, especially when it’s that strange and complex, it can be very open to interpretation.

The Marathon cinematic was co-produced by your studio, Pinkman.TV, alongside Madrid-based animation studio Illusorium Studios and Canada’s Agora Studio. You’ve worked with both on shorts like Jibaro, The Witness, and your Watch Dogs: Legions cinematic. What do you admire most about them as creative collaborators?

In the case of Agora Studio, I’ve worked with them from the very, very beginning. I worked with them partially on The Windshield Wiper, and we worked together on “The Witness.” I think that they created this studio a little bit before “The Witness,” and I just love that we get along, we understand each other’s needs. They know very well how I like to work. They know the animation style that I like. We don’t do motion capture; we do basically reference with different cameras so the animators can actually study the movement of the body, and these animators are really good. This is a school of Dreamworks Animation. The supervisors, they’ve all been at DreamWorks and they have really incredible talent. And I don’t want to work with anybody else in the future; we already have a great relationship.

In the case of Illusorium, they are here in Madrid. It’s a really big studio that is very well established, and I worked with them on the Watch Dogs commercial. I worked with them in my other films, because in my other films, I sort of like to create the studio from scratch. I borrow the computers, and I set up the whole thing. And this time my producer, [Sergio Jimenez] and myself, we wanted [to do that] because Bungie wanted to start immediately. We wanted to find a vendor that was able to work closely with me, and they were the best choice and they did amazing work.

And that’s what happens often in animation. You need so many people, you need so many vendors, we ended up being a crew of 100 or 120, and it’s very important that you have a really good relationship with vendors that might specialize in rigging, or specialize in texturing, or specialize in modeling. Or, in the case of Agora, they specialize in animation only. So we basically spread the project all over the world, and we needed to supervise everything with the art direction, storyboards, writing, and any character designs that we needed. It was all done basically here in my living room.

The credits state that the short was completed on March 22, just three weeks before its online premiere. How was your experience working with Bungie on the short, and is there any particular element or scene from it that you are particularly proud of?

Working with Bungie has been really great. They gave me absolute freedom, except of course in the case of some details where perhaps we were doing something wrong according to the Marathon universe. Like, “No, we couldn’t do this because the game doesn’t allow these kinds of things,” or this character wouldn’t do things like that. That’s important stuff. But other than that, I mean, I’m a person that I like to show my work when I am proud of it, and I don’t like micromanagement or studios that are clients who are like, “Show me something.” The creative process is ugly, always, and sometimes if you show something too early, it can be against everybody, and not only myself, but also the client themselves. So they respected that, and we were very much showing things as soon as we had something that was mindblowing. We cannot show anything in my studio that is not like, “Oh, wow, this is some cool shit.” So it was a really, really good experience and I really appreciate the space that they gave me.

We need to also keep in mind that Marathon art director Joe Cross and their team, they’ve been working for a long time on this game, and I didn’t want to invent or change anything when I was seeing the characters or when I was seeing the world. Of course, because of the render engine that you need for gaming versus the render engine that you need for specific renders in cinema, you can put a lot of effort and technology into any specific shot, while in-game, you need 360 degrees. It’s like a completely different render style, but we were really inspired by everything that they did, and we were working as close as possible. Once they had something, they showed us. Sometimes we were working in parallel and we needed to change things on our side, or sometimes we were working parallel and we showed them our work, and they decided to change things on their side. As I said before, we were retrofitting one another artistically, and I thought that was a really nice thing. I was extremely inspired by the art team that these guys had.

In 2019, it was reported that you were slated to write and direct your first feature film. Can you offer any updates on any of your current projects, and do you have any interest in revisiting the Marathon universe in the future?

I think that the Marathon universe is amazing and super inspiring to make any sort of material. You can make feature films, you can make tv shows. I definitely wouldn’t mind revisiting it if things work out. It’s extremely inspiring, and I could totally see just a whole film looking like the animation that we did; that’s something I personally would love to watch, especially because the characters have a lot of depth, and their writing can be cool and mysterious.

There’s a lot of things happening in terms of what’s next in my career. I’m constantly working on my feature film and I think it’s gonna take a long time. Unfortunately, fucking animation takes forever, and like I said, this is an eight-minute short film we did and we started talking in [spring] of last year. So my feature film, I’m working on it, and there is some tv as well happening, but I cannot really say more than that. But those are my next projects.I don’t think I’m gonna jump into more cinematics or anything that is not either my feature film or tv, so unfortunately that means I’m going to be gone for a while working and developing these projects. I’m super happy though because that’s my dream. I always wanted to make feature films and tv shows in animation, and it’s happening. So I’m focusing and concentrating on that at the moment.