Mojang Studios’ Minecraft has built a community of 141 million active players by encouraging them to tell their unique stories every day inside the game. The release of Minecraft’s Trails & Tales update — which focused on creativity, self expression and personal journeys — served as the perfect opportunity to gather the stories of Minecraft’s global community.
Together with creative partner 215 McCann, Minecraft launched the #MinecraftYourStory program with the goal of generating hundreds of unique, diverse stories with a single prompt. Players were encouraged to imagine finding a chest in their home full of items about themselves, and by touching one, they pictured being taken on a journey of self-discovery, returning home with a newfound sense of what makes them unique.
Minecraft partnered with creators StacyPlays and Shubble to kick off the program across various social media platforms, calling for the submission of everyone’s stories across all types of formats. From there, agency 215 McCann, alongside editor Kamila Daurenova of Cut+Run and VFX partner Jogger Studios, united these user-generated stories to create a moving collage of multimedia formats that tells a singular tale.
“The agency team was incredibly open and collaborative, empowering me to contribute a creative POV and visual identity early in the process,” explains Daurenova. “Since the theme of the piece highlights creativity and self-expression in its different forms, we wanted to play around with using different mediums to bring everything together. It was super helpful having our in-house VFX team Jogger on board, as I could run my ideas by them, and they would come back with some really incredible explorations. It was an exciting process, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to explore techniques and help deliver a film that reflects the passionate community of storytellers Minecraft inspires.”
Kamila Daurenova
Daurenova has long been interested in the combination of 2D and practical techniques in video. She felt Minecraft was an ideal project to explore this integration with the goal of providing a cohesive feel through a variety of user generated content. “I did most of this exploration in my evenings after work, because I got so excited by the idea and wanted to give it proper time,” Daurenova explains. In one section, she took video screengrabs, printed each frame, and played around with ripping and layering the paper before scanning the images back in. For another part of the film, she used acrylics and painted over each frame of the character walking. To bring it all together, Kamila edited the project in Adobe Premiere Pro 2023, and Jogger created the VFX and finishing in Flame and Adobe After Effects.
The result is a celebration of hundreds of perspectives from around the globe and a tribute to Minecraft’s hope that by telling these stories, we can build a better world. The film debuted at the Minecraft Live event and is to be featured on Minecraft’s Build a Better World landing page. This page serves as the central hub where everyone can learn more about the social impact work Mojang Studios does around education, equity and sustainability — three key pillars that guide Minecraft’s Build a Better World work and beyond.
SoStereo provided the music for the project, and Lime did the sound design and mix.
