Grand Theft Auto IV goes to the movies

When is a video game, not a video game? When it’s a feature film of course. Confused? Don’t be, for that is what clever French filmmaker Mathieu Weschler has done to one of the most iconic video games of all time, Grand Theft Auto IV.

Using the rather fashionable machinima (a portmanteau of machine and cinema, obviously) application that was bundled in with the software, Weschler has created an 88-minute long film using footage captured from the game.

Trashmaster tells the tale of a latter day Travis Bickle type who’s intent on cleaning up the streets of New York: quite literally in his case because the unnamed titular hero is by day a binman (ok, sanitation worker) and by night a rogue vigilante taking on the city’s nefarious underworld.

The movie took Wechsler two painstaking years to complete and is well worth a watch. Oh, for Daley Thompson’s Decathlon to have had a similar function back in the Eighties.