"The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Phil Rice grew up in the village of Illinois. Morton is the "pumpkin capitol of the world" because of the Libby's pumpkin processing plant (owned by Nestle) located there. Morton is solidly middle class having been settled by Swiss and German immigrants who were essentially conservative and religious in nature. It was a small town even when Phil was growing up. The 2000 census lists the population of Morton at 16,000: a third the size of Twin Peaks. His family was very religious and Phil joined with them in worship, although as a young man he would struggle with his inherited faith. Growing up, he was always interested in music and sound. As a child he received a cheap cassette tape recorder, which he used to create voices and stories, add sound effects, all to amuse himself and his family. Eventually he was given an RCA video camera and made simple films that would "make people laugh", as he puts it. This early interest in sound, film and comedy would inform his later work in machinima. The family moved to Florida when Phil was 12.

"High School was OK. I felt too shy to do any drama/plays, but I was in the concert band and marching band as a trumpet player (First Chair my senior year), and playing piano for the jazz band"

Phil had a few friends in high school, but didn't really blossom socially until his junior and senior years when he started dating quite a bit. He kept his cards pretty close to his chest for the most part. And that was the way he wanted it to be. Music was his one solace and, as he puts it, "it was (and has remained) a very private peace."

Eventually, Phil decided to pursue a career in music and chose a small, private 4 year college in Nashville, TN. But as he began to discover what the life of a professional musician would actually be like, he realized that he just didn't want to live that way.

"The more I got to know about the lifestyle of somebody who achieves success in that field (professional music) and the business practices that I observed because Nashville is right in the heart of the music biz. I came to this awful realization that even if I got what I was going for, I would be miserable."

He changed his major to philosophy. In his studies, he found himself attracted to 19th century philosphers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. You can see this interest in his choice of the word "Overman" as his internet name and "Zarathustra Studios" for the name of his production company. Both are words associated with the philosophy of Nietzsche. Phil graduated from college in 1995 with a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and a minor in music.

After graduation he began an intense period in his life where he felt that "pragmatism was the only thing that made sense", a not uncommon sentiment voiced by disillusioned college students the world over. Money was big issue, or lack of it. Eventually he was so broke he had to pawn his trumpet to make ends meet. Disillusioned and without money, he as at a very low point in his life.

Fortunately, he found work in a restaurant waiting tables and started to become attracted to the idea of having more responsibility. He began working towards the goal of becoming manager of a restaurant and eventually he succeeded. The "experience was priceless for me", he says. Eventually he moved on to an IT (Internet Technology) position, which meant less hours. It was at this time that he discovered machinima.

Because he had regular access to the Internet, he started playing Quake2 online with a clan he had joined. Not long after that he discovered the demo scene of Quake2. Since he was so chronically short of money, he needed a hobby that would cost virtually nothing. He liked the idea that movie-making in games was something you could essentially do for free, so he began to get involved in the Quake2 demo scene.

"I'd always enjoyed making demos in Quake2 with my friends and then watching them back. But then, oh, my God, you can actually edit these things into something else? It just kind of went from there"

In 1998, Phil began work on his first machinima, which was actually a re-cam of a famous Quake2 deathmatch between Thresh and Billox, both past and current champions of the Quake gamer scene. He put the film together in less than a week and released it to wide interest and approval. Making the Thresh demo taught him the basics of filmmaking in Quake2 using the movie software mod Keygrip2. With these improved skills, he got the idea to direct his first machinima film when he saw another short Quake2 film called Gibs, made by someone called "Inhabitant".

"It was one of the earliest Quake2 films ever made, and was a mock commercial, probably 2-3 minutes long...I watched that film, and the idea came to me for what I wanted to attempt: a mock, full-length sitcom (i.e. 22 or so minutes").

Shot in 30 days with a group of Quake friends, Father Frags Best was a smart, funny parody of the Father Knows Best sitcom of the fifties. FFB was the first bone-fide hit of machinima filmmaking. Featured on THE gaming site of the time, Bluesnews.com, the film took the gaming community by storm, generating over 10,000 downloads in the first month of it's release (Jan 1999). It was the second highest download that week on Planetquake.com, second only to the latest Quake2 patch. FFB went on to win a 1999 Quake movie Oscar for best comedy. This early film proved that machinima can produce interesting and entertaining films, but also that it can be a very unique medium for story telling. FFB was a great advertisement for machinima and probably helped usher in a new group of filmmakers who wanted to make films of their own.

Phil continued creating re-cams after FFB, covering prominent matches of the time with Fragfest II Finals, Ride That Rocket and Quake2 done Quick2 all in 1999. He also wrote a series of detailed tutorials for Keygrip2, which made clear how to use the program to create machinima films. These tutorials were highly detailed and helped many people figure out what was, for some people, a difficult software program to learn. In a sense, this accomplishment may have had more impact on the machinima community than his actual demo films. Combine his demos, the success of his first film, the excellent and much needed tutorials and it was a heady time for Phil, but then something went wrong.

"In 2000 when I had my famous disappearing act from machinima, I was crashing in a number of ways. I told people what I had to tell them and took off. Basically it was running home, I'm in hurtin' shape"

At some point in 2000, Phil Rice suffered a severe and debilitating personal crisis, which caused him to withdraw, or "disappear", from the game/machinima scene. I respected his privacy, so I didn't ask Phil to go into detail about what happened to him at that time, but he did say that he felt a great deal of "anger and guilt". He saw his life collapsing and said to himself, "I've got to do this". So, he set about "re-building my life from scratch". During this crisis period the works of Ayn Rand were particularly helpful to him. Ayn Rand was a noted popular author and philosopher. Her concept of "radical self-reliance; rejection of the Judeo-Christian understanding of sin and it's call to servant-hood" were instrumental in in shaping the values of Phil's new life. "The idea of shaping the world with the labor of our hands, loving what we make" and "the idea that confidence is not a sin, and that being human is not something to be ashamed of" were concepts he took to heart. Phil told me that Ayn Rand's ideas were "highly inspirational". It's not hard to see that Phil was probably struggling with the older, religious values of his parents and was trying to forge his own identity.

"I found my own personal 'death of god' to be a tragedy, one I had a very difficult time recuperating from. I teetered on the brink of utter nihilism for a good many years."

It was ironic then, that Phil returned to his family, now living in Florida. It's not unusual for people in crisis to appeal to their family for help. "Unable to stomach the shame of moving in with them", Phil found and lived in an apartment not far from the family construction business. His father gave him a job in the "field capacity" (probably working on a construction site) for a while as Phil slowly pulled himself together and got his feet back on the ground again. Shortly after starting his new job, the company got a huge computer upgrade and Phil was called in to assist. Since he had experience as an IT, it was a natural progression. As it became apparent that the company needed a full time technician for the new system, and since Phil could do it, he got the job.

Over time the IT part of his job started to take up less and less time, so he asked for more work to do and started handling the employee benefits and then payroll. At this point, Phil was single and unattached, so he'd head home after work and do database development at night in his apartment.

The family construction business flourished and over a few years the revenue doubled and the number of employees rose from 125 to 200. Phil's job(s) became too much for one person to handle, so he started hiring people to do the various jobs he had been doing. One of those people he hired, Nilufar ("flower" in Persian), eventually became his wife, but Phil tells me "that's a story for another time". But he will say that he felt he had finally "developed enough as a person to be able to love someone".

At present, Phil is working with his Dad to prep the business so that his Dad can retire from the construction business. Phil is Vice President of the company and has his hands "all over the sales, operation and finances" of the family business. When I asked him how he felt about having so much responsibility, he said "I love it".

Rewinding our story a bit, the end of 2004 saw Phil slowly moving back into the machinima scene. He began reading posts at Machinima.com and started watching films. A lot had changed since he left the scene in 1999. Frustrated with website problems at machinima.com that never seemed to get solved, Phil wrote Hugh Hancock, the founder of the site, in December of 2005 and offered to help. Unknown to Phil, Hugh had sold the site and really didn't want to do much to fix a site that was soon to be overhauled. Hugh declined Phil's help, but Hugh found out that Phil had experience in sound editing, and as luck would have it Hugh's company, Strange Company had lost their sound editor, so he offered the work to Phil. This brought Phil back into the world of machinima big time, since Bloodspell was and is a huge undertaking involving a very large crew and literally thousands of hours of work for what eventually will become a full-length feature film. Phil's job as sound editor is a "huge challenge for me", so much so that he has created a small foley studio in his apartment to create the unique sounds required for the Bloodspell story. At the time of this writing (Oct 2006), Phil has just completed Ep.11 out of 14 episodes. The series will be complete in November. Then it will be re-edited into a feature film to be released sometime in March/April, 2007.

"There are times when you feel like the bass player in a band with a great frontman. But in the end the Strange Company crew brings the bass player out for a bow. They don't have to do that. It's just how they are"

December 2005 also saw Phil team up with his new friend, Dr. Nemesis, to help with the first machinima related podcast, Machinima Live, created by Digital-Phil (a different Phil). As "Overman", our Phil was a co-host and composed music for the show. It was a good show made even more interesting by Phil's comic sensibility and great music arrangements. Unfortunately, back stage conflicts caused Dr. Nemesis and Overman to leave the show. Machinima Live continued on for a while, but at present the site is down and the show is sadly in limbo.

2006 has been a break out year for Overman. Picking up on the podcast idea, Overman began his Overcast in March. It is a very successful mix of information and entertainment with Overman reviewing current machinima films, software programs, commentary, and a "clip of the week' from a favorite machinima film. All of this is wrapped up with Overman's own original music and comedy skits. The show sounds wonderful and has developed quite a following. Looks like that boy with a cassette tape recorder has finally gotten the audience he was looking for. The show is currently in its 9th episode and Overman tells me he plans on expanding the show with interviews now that Machinima Live is gone.

Overman has also begun blogging on machinima and related subjects. His blog is an important source for an increasingly fragmented machinima community. His comments and opinions are always intelligent and informative. At times he has broached provocative topics that get the community buzzing. He plans on continuing both the podcast and the blog for "as long as it interests me". I hope that it will be a long time since Overman's comments and ideas are a source of inspiration to me as an artist and filmmaker. I think that this is the case for many in the community as well.

This year has also brought Overman into collaboration with several machinima filmmakers. His sound editing and music for the The Fixer (created by an equally talented filmmaker, ToddNYC), is superb. To date, there have been over 3 episodes released in the 4 part Fixer series. He has composed music for the highly regarded The Days After by Andre Pesch (another excellent director). He has re-worked his first film, Thresh vs Billox, and added music to the film. He also created a highly entertaining "Highlight Reel" of TvB with his own very amusing version of Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King" music. Increasingly, Phil's collaborations have helped good films sound better. And by sharing his time and talent with other machinima filmmakers he helps keep the community alive and inspires others in the community.

Over the summer, Overman began hanging out at the excellent Britannica Dreams website and found he was becoming increasingly interested in Sims2 machinima. Kheri and Michelle, who run the site, gave him inspiration and provided the opportunity for Overman to try out a short experimental film with their non-competitive "one minute film contest". Overman's entry Reveal is a wonderful and ambiguous short film filled with detailed sound and hints of a story never fully..ah..revealed. This was a practice run for a larger film which Overman released in September, Male Restroom Ettiquette. Like the earlier Father Frags Best, MRE became a massive hit this time on YouTube.com with (at present) over 2 million views. This film is probably one of the most-watched machinima film in history. Overman spent about two weeks filming and editing this amazing and entertaining parody of the Educational/Mental hygiene films. Once again, Overman uses parody of an existing genre to generate his own brand of intelligent, but often subversive humor. This unparalleled achievement is a love letter to the machinima community since literally millions of people who have never seen a machinima film are now being introduced to this cool, new, animated artform.

"The volume of e-mail and YouTube private messages has been remarkable. Number one e-mail inquiry: 'Wow, how did you make that?' I answer ALL e-mails I receive about the film, individually. It's a significant time investment, but I think it's essential to do for as long as I am able; 'fans' are built on nothing less"

At present, Phil is involved in several on-going collaborations and has a large work in the production stage. I promised Phil I wouldn't tell you about it though. He wants to save the announcement until he's ready. You can track his work at his well-designed "z-studios.com" website.

I asked Phil where he found the energy to do all of this work and still be VP of a large construction company. He told me that "I don't know where the energy comes from, but I like it too much to question where it comes from."

"Hugh jokes that "I'm the guy who never sleeps". Not exactly, but it's true that I don't sleep much; don't seem to need much right now, 4-5 hours tops. Main thing is just try to minimize wasted time".

I've read that one of the criteria for defining genius is a huge abundance of energy. Phil certainly has superhuman energy, if you consider the kind of schedule he must have. Plus, he is the father of a one-year-old son, Askar ("the mighty one"). How Phil can create top level machinima, a blog, a podcast, collaborate on other peoples films, answer emails, oversee a major construction company's office and be a husband and father, and friend to a wide range of machinima filmmakers is beyond me. He energy and focus is incredible.

Considering the dark place Phil Rice came from in 2000 and the struggle to find himself and his life, I think he has done a magnificent job of building a new, happy life. The fact that he gives it back to us in the form of films and entertainment and friendship is proof of that. If that isn't love, I don't know what is.

Congratulations, Phil, on creating such a fine new life for yourself.

"Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice."

-Ayn Rand