"C'mon! C'mon!"
June 5, 2014 7:44 AM Subscribe
There were some nice things in that scene that they simply couldn't do, like the T-800 lifting John Connor out of his bike, but the big reason this fell flat for me was the camerawork. And it boils down to the difference between the goals of the camera in movies and video games.
In a movie the camera's job is to direct the audience's attention to the important characters, and (often) to show us where their attention is focused, and how they're feeling about it. So there's narrow angles with characters filling the screen, and cutting back and forth between important elements works great.
In a video game, the character is important automatically (the character's success is the player's success), and the player decides what to pay attention to, and mostly how to feel about it. But different players will choose different things and have different reactions to them. If the game's camera picks one point of interest or shows the character responding too differently from the player, that breaks the immersion. So games like wide camera angles that are deliberately agnostic about the character's interests or reactions, and cuts or sudden camera movements are avoided, because they distract the player, who needs to keep track of the spatial relationships. (First-person games are another story)
I don't know how they made this video or how much control they had over the camera. Maybe this was a deliberate choice so that the video would still feel like GTA, which it wouldn't if it was shot with cinematic camera angles. But it sure made me appreciate the original a lot more.
posted by aubilenon at 11:11 AM on June 5, 2014 [1 favorite]
In a movie the camera's job is to direct the audience's attention to the important characters, and (often) to show us where their attention is focused, and how they're feeling about it. So there's narrow angles with characters filling the screen, and cutting back and forth between important elements works great.
In a video game, the character is important automatically (the character's success is the player's success), and the player decides what to pay attention to, and mostly how to feel about it. But different players will choose different things and have different reactions to them. If the game's camera picks one point of interest or shows the character responding too differently from the player, that breaks the immersion. So games like wide camera angles that are deliberately agnostic about the character's interests or reactions, and cuts or sudden camera movements are avoided, because they distract the player, who needs to keep track of the spatial relationships. (First-person games are another story)
I don't know how they made this video or how much control they had over the camera. Maybe this was a deliberate choice so that the video would still feel like GTA, which it wouldn't if it was shot with cinematic camera angles. But it sure made me appreciate the original a lot more.
posted by aubilenon at 11:11 AM on June 5, 2014 [1 favorite]
<3 you, Los Santos.
posted by dry white toast at 9:44 PM on June 5, 2014
posted by dry white toast at 9:44 PM on June 5, 2014
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posted by hellphish at 9:20 AM on June 5, 2014