NewEnglandFilm.com

If violence in the media seems a controversial subject, think of the reaction when Danny Ledonne created a video game based on the school shooting at Columbine. The game and the public debate it provoked is now the subject of Ledonne’s documentary Playing Columbine screening this month at the Boston Underground Film Festival.

“I think some people are cynical about the entire situation [and] assumed that I intended to make a controversial game,” Ledonne said, “so I could make a film about it.”

Ledonne created the game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! in 2005 as a free downloadable game on the internet and depicts the events of the 1999 Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado through the eyes of the two shooters.

After creating the game, Ledonne anonymously created a website and discussion board for the game, passing it along to friends to download.

“I never really [made it] to be a public spectacle, but the first year it was online (2005-2006), there were 10,000 downloads,” he said.

Before the concept of a game or even the documentary that would follow, Ledonne, a sophomore high school student living in Colorado during the events of Columbine, saw the lengths to which both national and local media went to find an explanation for the actions and a cause for blame.

“As a high school student, I felt frustrated by the representation of video game culture, and youth culture, in the wake of Columbine as being demonic and inciting violence,” he said.

The game entered the national spotlight after Brian Crecente, a writer for the gaming website Kotaku, and a former journalist for the Rocky Mountain News, wrote about it, and soon coverage of the game spiraled into other national papers.

“I stated saving these clips, didn’t know why exactly, but just did,” Ledonne said, who had worked in documentary films and media before the game, but nothing that had stirred up such far-reaching attention.

It wouldn’t be until six years after the events that Ledonne finally saw himself with a proper platform to tackle the subject and bring back the discussion, after graduating from Emerson College.

“That’s what I was ultimately trying to accomplish, to try and start a dialog that I wished had gone on initially at the time of the shooting,” Ledonne said.

One of the biggest controversies covered in the documentary concerned Ledonne’s entry of the game into the Slamdance Film Festival’s guerrilla gaming competition. The game sparked a discussion after it was pulled from the competition, resulting in fellow competitors pulling their games, and the University of Southern California pulling its sponsorship of the festival.

“After the Slamdance issue, I thought, ‘If I don’t make this film in five or 10 years, I’m going to regret it. This has touched a lot of people, and it seemed like an important thing,’” he said.

While searching for outside funding for his documentary, Ledonne would soon realize his previous experience in film production, both as a graduate of Emerson College’s film program and his work on nature documentary shorts, put him in a more liberating place than other budding documentary filmmakers.

“I was talking to a friend who worked for HBO, and he said ‘Danny, you already own your own camera, editing station, why not go and do it yourself?” Ledonne said. “[So] I personally financed the film, good news is it doesn’t cost a lot of money to make a documentary of this scale.”

Carrying all his equipment in one backpack, Ledonne arranged his shooting schedule economically. Consolidating all necessary shots during his trips through Boston, New Hampshire and Montreal to save on money. Ledonne also slept on the floor of his friends music studio in Alamosa, CO while working on mixing and scoring the film.

“In total I spent about $12,000 on production,” he said.

Ledonne began meeting with professionals in the video game industry, as well as individuals affected by the Columbine shooting. The film also features one of Ledonne’s harshest critics, the president of the Parents Television Council.

“I thought it was important to hear the criticism, to get the bigger perspective, being apart of a movement about games having serious social subject matter,” he said.

“There were some people that I didn’t want to sit down with, [mainly] people most critical of the game, I didn’t interview [them],” Ledonne said.

Instead, he hired friends to perform the interviews with his most avid critics. While they were aware it was for a film Ledonne was making, he still felt there needed to be a forum for these individuals to be speak honestly and openly about both him and the game.

“If I didn’t present that, it would come across that everyone loved the game, which isn’t true,” Ledonne said, “I wanted some level of measured candor from the people I interviewed.”

Ledonne screened around seven different cuts of the documentary at different video game festivals around the country before setting his sights on the festival circuit.

“The first question every filmmaker wants to ask, is where they want their film to premiere,’ he said.

Ledonne applied and was accepted into the AFI film festival, where the film officially premiered, and would also go on to be screened at the Denver and Santa Fe film festivals. Over time, Ledonne found festivals coming to him looking to him to screen the film.

“After a year and half, I didn’t have to bother applying,” he said.

Though still in the process of securing domestic and international distribution for the film, Ledonne has found success with online platforms and even the realm of education. Playing Columbine continues to be screened on college campuses around the country including the University of Texas at Dallas.

“[I] see the future of this film being screened in media libraries and used in curricula as a form of outreach,” he said.

When looking back at the process of making the film and what he personally gained from both the experience and the discussion, Ledonne recalls an interview with a friend of a victim of the Columbine shooting, and how it opened his eyes to what still remains of the subject of violence and it’s portrayal in the media.

“He explained in his interview that it’s different with video games, films you sit down and just engage with, [giving] you something to think about,” he said, “but with a video game, it’s something you sit down and numb your mind with. No one had quite put that to terms with me, and if there is going to be a viable movement for video games, designers and producers need to make the case that it isn’t just about numbing your mind, but something more to be taken seriously.”

Despite the seemingly unending debate over violence in the media, especially video games, Ledonne sees his entry into the conversation to be his last.

“Everything I wanted to say about this issue I put into this film,” he said, “I didn’t want to typecast myself as the guy doing films on violence and school shootings.”