My boss sent me a link to a fascinating little movie as a research datapoint. There are a lot of very cool and interesting things happening in this, especially for a technical artist like me. I keep looking at things, trying to pick apart what is going on, and how I’d replicate it or do it better. There are some great visuals in this short film, and it would have been a blast to work on it.
One of the more interesting things that popped out at me is that the movie is designed to run on an endless, seamless loop. As such, it really changed how I viewed the character that the movie “starts” on… but nothing moved, it’s entirely a matter of context and extra revealed information. It’s a bit like how Shamus described a key character in Bioware’s Jade Empire game; the character is the same one, it’s just the new information that the viewer/player is given changes how you look at the character.
To me, that’s great writing, and I wish we would see more of that in games.
So, without further ado,
(And yes, that’s sort of spoilerish. Sorry.)
That was a superb little film.
From the little I know of creating effects like that, it requires a lot of cameras placed throughout the set in order to “freeze” the scenario like that and allow a single, solitary camera to roam through from one end to the other.
All of the cameras are digitally removed while footage from other cameras is used to ensure what replaces the space left by the now absent cameras is the image that would have appeared if the camera was not there in the first place.
Once that has been done you can then pan a virtual camera throughout the set to reproduce the effect as seen in that short.
I like the way that film ended at the same place as where it had begun, but with the information provided from our trip through the hospital we now see the “opening scene” in a very different light.
On an unrelated note, I attempted to email you via what I surmised was your email address from this page: http://tishtoshtesh.wordpress.com/about/
I came up with silverwingsDOTartATgmailDOTcom or is that not correct?
Yes on the email, Capn’. I don’t check it all that often, but that’s right.
Indeed, I think that would have to be a series of cameras with a *lot* of post processing. I definitely like how the starting character *changes* once you loop back around. He’s the same guy in the exact same pose, but the information is different. Very clever.
Supposedly this is actually up on the filmmakers’ site, complete with commentary. They might discuss the effects work there. I should check.
This is definitely a well-crafted 2:19 film.
That’s astounding, thanks.
Awesome. Thanks for the link.
I’m going to have to watch this a few more times, at least. So much packed into a couple minutes…