American Cinematographer - August 2018 - 62

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Electric Realms

Cinematic lead Maxime Brochen operates the virtual camera, which includes an onboard
monitor that's fed a view from inside the game's 3D environment, allowing the crew to shoot
those environments as if they were actually in those spaces.

shooting process. First, the actors are
scanned so that 3D versions of their
characters can be generated. Then they
are shot on the motion-capture stage -
with trackers on their bodies and faces
- where they interact with very basic
elements, such as wood-frame sets, that
represent objects that will later be seen
in the game. We have two or three
cameras shooting in HD, creating reference footage that is then used by the
animation and facial-animation teams
to refine the tracked movements of the
62

August 2018

actors. All of the captured data is
ingested and applied to the animated
3D characters, who are placed within
the 3D sets, where they can then be shot
and lit for the final, in-game cinematic.
Because we're creating so many
iterations of action and dialogue, the
daily page count is massive. So when
we're on the stage with the actors, the
focus is just on getting the performance
rather than on camerawork and lighting. Once the performance is in the can,
then we have the freedom to set the
American Cinematographer

frame and light the shot on a PC.
Transitioning from a filmed
sequence to one where the player is in
control can be done seamlessly. For
example, the last shot of the filmed
scene might be a close-up that then
becomes the shot of the player in
control. Think of how Birdman [AC
Dec. '14] was shot: The actor is in a
close-up, then walks away, and without
cutting, the camera follows him
through the set. For us to do this effectively, the last filmed shot must have the
"environment" lighting, not the "closeup" lighting - which meant that we
"only" had to create close-up lighting
for around 27,000 of the 29,200 shots
that we created.
The environment lighting has to
work in every direction all the time, as
the player can pretty much look and go
anywhere. Fortunately, lights in games
don't need sources - you can hide
them in thin air. You can place a "lamp"
right in the shot and the light it emits
will be evident in the scene, but the unit
itself is invisible. However, the most
expensive thing in video games is
having overlapping lights; more on that
later.
Lighting this project was a great
exercise. It was a bit of a throwback to
early studio films because we didn't
have bounced or diffused light. The
3D-engine team - the amazing engineers who built the in-house software
that generates the 30 images you see on
screen every second - did develop soft
lights, but by that point we were too far
into the project and couldn't add them,
so we worked with blurred shadows
instead.
When dealing with the quantity
of shots that we were, you cannot do it
single-handedly. You need teams of
specialized light and camera artists,
which means I had to delegate. David
Cage and cinematic lead Maxime
Brochen supervised a dedicated camera
team, and I focused on the lighting with
a dedicated lighting team of amazing
artists. The teams' unifying thread was
the brief I had generated for the game's
look.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2018