“I haven’t played Street Fighter in years,” Mike said as he awkwardly picked up the controller. Mike, a friend I’ve known since junior high school, but I hadn’t seen in years, had never really played much of the Xbox at all either. He was used to the Playstation controller. But he shrugged as he looked at the screen of characters in Street Fighter IV. A vague smile came over him after he passed each one.

“Remember Street Fighter II? It’s just like that,” I said. “It really isn’t too bad to get used to, sort of like riding a bike. I’ll pick someone I don’t usually play to make things even.” I chose M. Bison and he chose Guile. Both of us hastily drank our beers before the match started, as if the very act of playing would make us die of thirst. When Mike won the first round he rubbed his hands together furiously and cackled like a gremlin. When I beat him the next two for the win, he insisted for another match. Then another. And then another after that. Sometimes one of us would scream with disappointment and stand up in a fury. Not long after we would sit down and just want to keep playing, enjoying every little aspect of competition we could squeeze out of this franchise that has been around 20 years.

The whole gaming session with Mike reminded me of why I loved Street Fighter in the first place, and Ian Cofino’s documentary I Got Next not only defines that experience, that frenzy of excitement that comes with playing the game, but it also reinforces it. I said as much in my review of the film, and even in its current early stages I Got Next embodies the type of vigorous competitiveness and community that even the most common of Street Fighter fans and players have seen over the years.

After I interviewed Ian over e-mail I had planned to do some large overarching article, something like I usually do for the site. But after reading the questions and answers over and over in their purest form, I really realized it was far more interesting that way, and I could only add so much to what Ian and his film already had to say. Ian himself had some really smart comments about storytelling, real independent filming, and the positive aspects of the Street Fighter IV community in general. So, enjoy reading the interview in all its unedited glory.

Just to get the general questions out of the way, what’s your name, age, hometown, and tell us just a little bit about I Got Next and what it is.

My name is Ian Cofino, I’m 22 and I’m from Rye, New York in Westchester County, which is about 40 minutes outside New York City. I Got Next is a free documentary on the fighting game scene. Although now, if I were to describe exactly what it’s focuses were, I’d say it’s more of a character study, that uses Street Fighter 4 and tournament play to propel the story forward.

There’s a lot of general info about how this film came into conception, that it was a college project that kind of grew in scope and passion. What I want to know is your actual act of filming. Did you just have one camera and run around yourself to interview all these people? Did you film it all over an extended period of time or all at once? Was there a particular story you wanted to get across when you first started filming, and how much did that change if at all?

In the beginning, the story, or what I thought would be the story was very different. In fact, I didn’t see a story at all. Because this was my senior project at the time, I tried to set limitations on the documentary, and also to make sure the focus was more on being able to exhibit my skills as a designer. So 7 months ago, I thought that the film would be more of a 10 to 15 minute segment, from one to two major tournaments and a few smaller local ones. The settings really were not important; it was about the players there, and what they had to say about the scene. So the film at the time had less of a focus on what they were playing, or who was winning, but it was more of an informative piece for people who maybe had not been exposed to the scene yet. I followed a lot of threads that I never did anything with in the current version of the film, such as: the rise and fall of arcades in America, the effect console gaming has on the community, online play, the Gamestop tournament to a degree (since it was just me filming, I couldn’t be everywhere at once, so I couldn’t film multiple players at multiple locations competing to get to the final round, I could only chronicle what they went through, or discuss their impressions). The more I filmed, the narrower the focus of the documentary became, I started to realize that I didn’t need this story thread, or I didn’t need to ask this question, because ultimately the response was unimportant to the final story. That may be why you see so much footage from Sinsation and Final Round and not NEC, because at that time, I had not met Ryan, and I was also not asking Justin and Joe all the right questions, the story was very different then.

As far as the technical issues go, it was just me, with one camera. The whole film is shot by myself (with the exception of some footage at NEC where a friend came with me, and some additional match footage at Sinsation and footage of the Liston vs Kensou fight from Final Round) on a Canon Vixia HV30, without any lighting equipment, and a rode shotgun mic that’s attached in the camera’s shoe. I definitely didn’t shoot like that for effect or because that’s the way I generally work, hell I don’t know how I generally work, since this is the first “film” I’ve ever made. I worked everything out as I went. The lack of equipment and personnel came from a lack of money on my part. At the first couple tournaments, I would go and interview players that I had heard of or who were winning and soon a story started to form, and I stuck with Joe, Justin and Ryan (I met Mike at Final Round and besides being a really great guy, he also fit perfectly into the documentary). So the shooting of the film (the short cut) happened over the course of about 3 to 4 months, with footage also making it’s way in from all the way up to June (some b-roll from the SBO Qualifying tournament in California), which is about 7 months into the project, although the majority of the footage really came from the first 3 to 4 months. The footage I was collecting after Final Round was all with the intention of playing a larger role in the feature length cut.

<< PREVIOUS 1 | 2 | 3 NEXT >>