Camera

I always wanted to do a one-shot cinematic and also had it planned for the final balcony scene in The Lord Inquisitor prologue. It didn’t work there at all, so I had to remove it. Once I was designing Origin Zero and thinking about the episodes, I started with Episode 03, the very long and complex one. Then one night I had a dream and was exactly seeing episode 01. When I woke up I thought, man, that could be a really cool first intro and I can finally make my one-shot cinematic. I then sat down and made the previz for the episode in order to visualize my idea to the other guys. Then we continued polishing it and I just changed it slightly in various areas to improve it, but in general this first episode is exactly like the dream I had about it, which was very funny as I had never worked like this before – might also be hard to control for future productions. I’m a big fan of Metal Gear Solid V and it only has one-shot cinematics. It’s obvious that in some scenes it works nicely, in others not so much. You can’t really use one-shot cinematics in every situation as it can result in a lot of problems, for example how to get from point A to point B. Besides that, you mostly lose a lot of connection to the main protagonist as the camera always have to move around to show what’s important next. This, however, fits perfectly for Episode 01 as the soldiers are not interesting at all from a character perspective.

The actual main character is the creature we don’t see. The soldiers are a symbol of power and control and because they all die within a couple of seconds, it showcases the strength of the enemy. So it didn’t matter who these soldiers were, I wanted to give more the feeling of standing just in-between them and not being able to see the enemy attacking you from somewhere in the forest. In UE4’s sequencer, I animated the entire camera by hand using tons of keyframes. I started with only the most essential keyframes to see the pacing and route of the camera. Then I placed my soldiers and other elements to see if the speed of the camera matches the soldiers, etc. The cameraman is not existent, so I can speed him up to travel bigger distances and also move the camera through small areas without the soldiers taking notice of that. At some point, I had to lock the animation of the camera which then allowed me to fine tune it. As the overall path and movement were in place, I added subtle camera changes and also made some up and down movements to make it feel more like a shaky hand camera. On top of that I made a blueprint that adds procedural noise towards the animation, enhancing the hand camera feel even more. I found that to be pretty complicated and hope the sequencer get a better solution for camera shake in the future. It was interesting to see that first person camera is a love/hate thing, while almost everyone really liked my designs and the first episode, many were complaining about the camera and that they don’t like it at all. The other half, however, especially pointed out the amazing camera work in this episode saying its brilliant and really unique. So, I knew a little bit in advance that this would result in a lot of negative feedback, but to me, that’s not a big problem as this one-shot camera will be only used in Episode 01. All other episodes will feature “regular” camera work and cuts, not because of people like that more, but because it serves the purpose of telling a story much better.

Plans

Episode 02 is already in the making and has a similar runtime like the first one. From its content, it will be quite different though and features some new challenges we need to figure out how to solve them. I made a traditional storyboard this time, all painted in Photoshop so that the animators know what needs to be worked on. This is all complete and I now work on the white-box models of the characters so that we can get the first animation passes done. I hope that this new episode will be live in around 3 months, of course, it will be uploaded exclusively on our YouTube Channel, which you can find here,