How Netflix’s Remarkable Life of Ibelin Delivered Its World of Warcraft Scenes Without Blizzard’s Knowledge

The remarkable life of Ibelinnow streaming on Netflix, one film is nested within another. The outer film is a sensitive, moving documentary about Mats Steen, a Norwegian World of Warcraft player who died at the age of 25 from a degenerative muscle disease. Within that is a more humorous, colorful, but still deeply felt animated film that captures the adventures, friendships, crushes and guild dramas that Steen experienced online with his character Ibelin – a mischievous, mustachioed ladies’ man.

The animation, rendered using authentic in-game Wow models, is more than just a gimmick. While Steen’s condition and associated mental health issues prompted him to withdraw from the real world, his life in it Wow and his roleplaying guild, Starlight, became the core of his existence – something of his own parents only discovered it after his death. The contrast between these richly animated sequences and the home video of Mats sitting almost motionless in front of his computer is heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time. The animation is the only way to capture the totality of his life: the film explores how the virtual environment allowed him to experience physical freedom, romantic connections and a deep sense of community that he could not enjoy in the real world.

To look IbelinI assumed Wow developer Blizzard must have been involved in its creation somehow; the quality of the animation is so high and so authentic to the game’s world. But director Benjamin Ree and animator Rasmus Tukia told me that they had postponed contacting Blizzard until their film was almost ready. Ree and producer Ingvil Giske had been working on the film for three years before they even contacted the game studio.

“We wrote them an email saying so we are a small Norwegian production company, we made this film‘, Ree said laughing. “Can we use your IP, your world, for free and without any intervention from you?Ree said Giske called this “the Norwegian way of doing things” – “We just took over the rights and then tried to ask for forgiveness.”

Blizzard invited the filmmakers to its California offices for a high-stakes screening. Giske was relaxed, but Ree, who calls himself ‘very neurotic’, took extra doses of asthma medication before the meeting ‘to be able to breathe’. He didn’t have to worry. “We showed them the film and then one of the bosses turned to us and he was crying. He said, ‘It’s a fantastic film and you get the rights to use it (whatever you need).’”

Tukia was also nervous, although he knew from experience that Blizzard is surprisingly liberal compared to some other companies when it comes to the use of its assets. He is a member of Wow‘S machine fan animation community, which Blizzard has traditionally supported. “They have always supported us and anyone who uses their resources, and that includes their music,” he said. “They’re not going to come up with these copyright violations (takedowns) or whatever because I think it ultimately helps them promote their game.”

Tukia started to play World of Warcraft in 2005, when he was 12, and not long after, he used the game to create simple animation videos for his YouTube channel. Around 2015, he discovered the software the community had created to export the assets they wanted to use from the game files for use in animation programs such as Maya. The quality of Tukia’s output suddenly increased; he went from making crude fake music videos to tightly edited, character-driven short stories.

Ree found those videos while researching ways to visualize Steen’s online life. He had a great resource to work with: Starlight provided Steen’s family with 42,000 pages of role-playing logs, character diaries, forum posts, and anomalous chat logs, illustrating the relationships Steen had built as part of his extensive online fantasy life.

Ree knew that this archive contained a universal story, and he just needed an accessible way to tell it. “I saw that it was almost a coming-of-age story there, and I could recognize many of the things that Mats had experienced through Ibelin in the film. World of Warcraft” he said. “My goal was for my 94-year-old grandmother to feel included in this world, but at the same time (we would) create a representation of the game that (Wow players) would feel representative.”

The humorous, sometimes sentimental tone of Tukia’s videos and his penchant for expressive close-ups on characters’ faces were spot on. “We loved his YouTube channel. It felt very true to the game,” Ree said. He traveled from Norway to Tukia’s native Sweden, expecting to meet at the office of a small animation company. Instead, he found himself at Tukia’s parents’ house, presenting the film over a dinner of Tukia’s mother’s lasagna.

“I was very moved and it didn’t take much convincing to get involved,” Tukia recalls. “The fact that they wanted me to animate someone’s life (…) I mean, the world is fictional, but the environment and the people there are very real. So I just thought it was an honor to get the role of animating real people based on real events. I took that very seriously. I really didn’t want to misrepresent anyone.”

A big part of it The remarkable life of IbelinThe film’s running time is animated, but Tukia worked largely alone, animating all the main characters, doing the camera work, and editing his segments; two other YouTubers helped with background characters, rigging and rendering. (According to Ree, the only help Blizzard provided was providing a level-up character so the team could actually capture in-game footage to use alongside the animation.)

Tukia resisted the temptation to put too much gloss on the paint Wow world when developing his own animation. “I mean, the whole movie is ultimately about authenticity,” he said. “We could have just improved it, made the lighting look super good and taken all the textures to the next level, but it wouldn’t have felt very authentic to the material. We didn’t really want it to look like a movie, but like a game represented as a film.”

Authenticity on World of Warcraft was one concern, but it was even more important that the animation be true to the stories of Steen and his guildmates, and their self-expressions in the game. Fortunately, their text role-play was very specific and illustrative.

“What’s fascinating about their type of role-playing is that they write such detailed descriptions, including about actions and character emotions,” Ree said. ‘So Mats wrote for Ibelin, something like: ‘Ibelin seems sincere and yet sad.’ And this gave us a lot of opportunities to creatively interpret that writing, that role play.

The filmmakers consulted with the members of Starlight the entire time, so they were confident that they would get the guild’s approval when they finally screened the film for them. “They had one comment that they thought was a mistake, and that was that a lot of the women Ibelin was interested in tended to wear more leathery clothes,” he laughed. “So after that feedback we went back and changed some of the clothing on the female characters to give them more leather. Then we locked the operation.”

Tukia says his favorite scene in the film is a montage showing the flirtation – within the role-playing game, but perhaps also beyond – between Ibelin/Mats and a character named Rumor, played by a guild member named Lisette.

“It kind of indicates playfulness, but also the feeling of falling in love for the first time,” Tukia said. “And you see (Mats) getting involved in this… It’s the embodiment of his happiness in a way. In the movie he likes to run because that’s his way of showing that his chains are broken. And I thought it was really nice that he actually ran with Rumor and invited her to run with him.”

This fragile, illusory, but emotionally very real world is one that Tukia recognizes because it is a world he comes from. “I met my partner online,” he said. “I also met the YouTube team I make videos with online. So in a way, most of my life revolved around meeting people online. Obviously I didn’t have a handicap (Mats), but I think most gamers can see themselves in his situation in some way.”

For Ree, the world that Steen and his guild shared was both strange and a little nostalgic – a reminder of the kind of friendships he formed earlier in his life. “The biggest thing I thought about a lot after making this film is the value of spending a lot of time together, and I’m very jealous of that,” Ree said. ‘When I look at Mats and his friends, they spent about five hours hanging out every day. It was very similar to the feeling of being a kid, where I would just run to the neighbor’s house and we would just hang out. We had time to just hang out together. It also shows why about fifty people wrote to Mats’ parents after his death about what he had meant to them. Mats has changed the lives of so many people.”

The remarkable life of Ibelin now streaming on Netflix.