An Interview with “Robox” Filmmaker Liam Marvin

As a microbudget filmmaker, how do you go about embracing your limitations?

I don’t believe in limitations when you can approach things in different perspectives. I think any project can be achieved, but it won’t be the first perspective you have when you first approach it. Not only with ideas, but with experimental mediums that seem impossible at first glance.

What draws you to machinima filmmaking?

It’s a medium I’ve never attempted before. As well as how emotions are unique to how they can be conveyed in machinima filmmaking. People play video games differently and with what happens, becomes an extension of the player. Indirect feelings.

In your film, the footage from Roblox- which is often seen as a silly game- juxtaposed with the voicemail recordings and music creates a strangely tender feeling of both sadness and warmth. What inspired you to find this emotional core in the contrast of those elements?

I love voicemails, they hold such a brief moment of time together. Happy and sad emotions, I rarely get voicemails anymore. I have a couple from when I was a kid; a flip phone from middle school. Hearing those led me to using the Roblox. A game I played when I was a kid. Listening to voicemails from the past four years while playing a childhood game is a unique, torn feeling. Especially comparing modern from past voicemails; why someone calls you changes. Voicemails will become a future medium for kids today who receive a phone too early. I’m curious to see the change from a 7 year old to a 27 year old. How would that feel hearing an array of voicemails? I think I only conveyed a snippet of that feeling. I only have so many voicemails.

In experimental filmmaking, "pushing the medium forward" is often a concern. Do you feel this is true in your work, or is it something less serious to you?

Pushing the medium forward means so much to me. Now more than ever, experimental filmmaking is growing due to how it allows people to share such niche emotions and explore them. I would love to push what’s possible, for the medium and for people to understand each other and themselves.

What do you hope to do next? (Any themes you want to continue exploring, genres you want to work in, mediums you want to experiment with? etc...)

My attention is on the philosophy of beginnings and endings. Everything that exists must begin (if you perceive it as flowing forward), and therefore end. So, what does an ending look like visually at its core? And what does an ending visually look like afterwards? Not focused on a new beginning after something ends, but when there is no further beginning.