I got sick over the summer, came down with some major flu or something. During that time, I took the chance to watch a couple of long movies I had put off for a while. One of them was Sergio Leone’sOnce Upon a Time in the West. It was this film that turned me into a lover of Western films. This is my own little Western that I filmed using the GTA IV PC Video Editor. Entitled Once Upon a Time in Bohan, it’s a little experiment inspired by Leone’s Westerns (I recommend watching this in full screen).

[flv:WesternBohan.mp4 500 285]

Despite the limitations and difficulties of using the video editor (which I feel was designed mostly to capture little clips of something cool that just happened), I was able to piece this together. I failed to pay attention to the in-game sound, so some scenes will be a little off because of the ‘sound mixing’. I had to add in Ennio Morricone’s score myself because the video editor doesn’t support music that isn’t licensed. All video editing was done in the game’s editor. If I remember correctly, I completed this short in July.I would’ve preferred a different ending involving Niko Bellic going down in a hail of gunfire. However, most of the footage was filmed during one (extremely long and painful) sitting. The ending was shot during a different session. Because it was a different session, the lighting and colors were off, and I was unable to shoot the ending I wanted unless I re-shot the entire film, which would’ve been damn nearly be impossible due to the nature of filming in GTA IV. Keep in mind that the only actor I have control over is Niko Bellic: everyone else’s actions and spoken lines (of which are few in this particular short) are not scripted and entirely out of my hands.I do intend to remake my film with a proper ending and even more attention to the tiny details, shaping it into a more deserving homage to the Westerns I enjoyed so thoroughly.