![]() ![]() ![]() What you see below is the first half of the very first animatic we created for the Left 4 Dead intro movie back in early July. In the early phases of development, we are not concentrating on animation, lighting or rendering quality. This way, we can try out different ideas and can make large improvements in story quality in a short period of time at low cost. It is important to understand that the purpose of an animatic is to define the timing of the dialog, story beats, edits, camera angles etc in order to quickly flesh out a story that works in a broad sense. If you're new to the world of filmmaking, it can be a bit disorienting to try and concentrate on the primary goals of an animatic because the animation is intentionally very basic, the rendering is often crude and the dialog frequently consists of placeholder lines recorded quickly by an artist or writer working on the piece. We began making animatics in mid summer as we started fleshing out the story and pacing of the piece, bringing in external test audiences to view the movie and provide feedback. In order to evaluate projects as we go along, our filmmaking team prototypes and tests our movies on external test audiences, just like the gameplay teams. ![]() To do this, we will show four different versions of the first half of the movie from various stages of production. In this blog entry, we'd like to share with you some insight into the process that led to the intro movie that shipped with Left 4 Dead. Starting a game with a movie was a new approach for us, but luckily we have built up some moviemaking expertise in the past few years with the Team Fortress 2 shorts. As a result, we decided that it would make sense to begin the game experience with a non-interactive introductory movie that could get players revved up and subtly cue them to important gameplay mechanics such as "light disturbs the witch" and "car alarms attract the horde." We didn't want a slow ramp-up in gameplay to take away from that tension. Traditional in-game training mechanics didn't make sense for Left 4 Dead, because they would take away from the sense that players had been immediately dropped into a very real, very dire zombie apocalypse. The Moviemaking Process: Left 4 Dead's Intro Movie DecemJason Mitchellīecause Left 4 Dead is a new property for us, we wanted to provide some basic player training prior to the start of the game. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |