Myst III Interview

Auf Worth Playing gibt es nun ein Interview (engl) zu Myst III: Exil mit Presto Studios. Myst III soll ja den Erfolg der Grafikadventure fortsetzten. Man wird sehen ob es gelingt.

2. The FMV sequences look great. How did you manage to intertwine them and the in-game rendered scenes in such a perfect way?

The concept behind live action compositing, or bluescreen compositing as it’s called in the industry, is really straightforward. The thought is that you film a character on blue making sure that their costume and everything that you want in the shot is not blue. And a simple way to put it is: Basically, in the computer, you take out anything that’s blue - and you leave anything that’s not blue - and what you’ll have is a really nice carved out version of the character.

There’s a lot of prep work that goes into a video shoot as technical as this. Obviously you start with the script. But then you do storyboards. You want to break down every shot. Scene by scene you break everything down almost to every single camera shot that’s going to be in the game. Then you break that down further, and start to figure out which lenses, which camera positions, all that type of stuff. When you finally get in to film you have notebooks of materials laying everything out: “On Monday, we’re doing these ten shots, and for this first shot the camera has to be right here, and it has to be this height, and it has to be this lens”. We had all the notes to match the lighting with the computer-generated world and the live action video. If a character walked into a room through a doorway and there were leaves blocking the light in the computer-generated world, then on set you had to match the same thing. The character has to walk through, come out of shadow, into light and the light that they walk into has to have the leave pattern. The thing is that when you put it all together it is totally convincing that the character actually exists in this computer-generated world. And most people have a very hard time drawing that line between what is real and what is not real.

You have to be ready if you’re going to spend that much money on a shoot. Especially having two stages, shooting with digital cameras and you have a crew of fifteen people waiting for you - you have to be ready. You have to have all your storyboards done. You have to have all your shots set up. You have to go in there almost like a General going to war saying, “We’re going to do this, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this.” You have your script, you have your storyboards, you’ve done your rehearsals. And you know exactly what you’re going to do. There is no creative freedom when you’re on stage. You have to match everything perfectly. The computer-generated world has to match the live action world with the actors. If it doesn’t match perfectly, it’s not convincing.

The prep work for the video shoot probably took about three or four months, which is amazing when, you consider that the video shoot was only seven days. From the time that we actually had the script we spent months doing storyboards, doing all the prop design and building all of the costumes, all of that work. It all has to be done in advance. It’s amazing when you start to think about the number of shots that you have to pick up and the technical complexity that is in those shots. You simply have to be ready. ~ Michel Kripalani, Technical Director for the Live Action Video Shoot, Executive Producer of Exile and CEO/President of Presto Studios, Inc.

21.08.2001, 05:47 [Joe]