Creating a Deeper Emotional Connection: The Cinematography of God of War

[Music] hi i'm dory rozzi i'm the director of photography at santa monica studio before we start i kind of want to get to know you guys a little bit really really quick pardon me for putting my hands up it's kind of bright up here uh any art or environment art people in the crowd today awesome level designers sweet animators represent uh dedicated cinematic teams are working in cinematic teams cool lighters programmers nice any producers awesome cool any people would like a background in photography awesome well thanks for coming concept art how could i forget my bad

you guys are awesome cool so before we go on uh spoiler alert we are going to be showing some content from god of war if you have not played the game yet my apologies so on god of war we were trying to create an immersive interactive narrative experience that was meaningfully engaging in a uniform manner from beginning to end we're trying to kind of challenge the concepts of a gay moment versus a cinematic moment and take the concept of a video game into true interactive entertainment now saying emotionally engaging is easier said than done all of us probably mostly all of us especially people into games are constantly bombarded by media movies tv games uh the little screens we have in our pockets these contents are always trying to vie for our emotion and what's happening over time we get desensitized we actually start creating barriers and defenses to push

against that content so pretty much we could say sane so how do we break through these barriers how do we create visual content that is emotionally resonating so we had a theory we're going to try to combine the idea of mentally engaging our players with emotionally engaging our players not just grabbing them by their mind by grabbing them by their gut grabbing them by their heart and not separately in different beats of the game but together and hopefully all the time so as we go through this talk i'd like you guys to ask yourself constantly three questions one is how are we experiencing the things we are looking at how do we gauge that experience and why are we feeling it the way we're feeling it once we figure out the how and the why let's try to figure out what we can do about it in order to kind of utilize it in order to push that engagement experience

so let's look at what we have out the gate in games we have a superpower and that is mental absorption most of the mechanics we have from the last amazing 20 years or so of game design is the ability to suck the viewer into the content and that is a very mental experience so if we look at some of the standard mechanics we haven't gained these days is navigation exploration it's a big boon to absorption getting us sucked in we have puzzles and other engaging mechanics it's a big boon to absorption we have combat that's a big mental absorption parameter but we also have story and story allows us to engage the viewer in a bit more of a sympathetic way and before we move on let's talk about the difference between sympathy and empathy it's going to be critical for the remainder of this talk sympathy is our ability to feel somebody something for somebody else it's a feeling for them experience empathy is our ability

to get engaged with somebody else's emotion but actually feel it as myself as us as we it's a personal versus an external experience the tricky thing with empathy is at least we found that you can't engage empathy directly it's a amalgamation of different parameters coming together and we'll get to that a little bit so we are trying to take absorption and combine it with sympathy to create a sense of empathetic immersion a sense you are truly really there in the content experiencing it as yourself both from a mental standpoint and from a sympathetic emotional standpoint so how do we do this how do we take absorption and combine it with sympathy and not only that how do we do that in a uniform enough manner that we can stay consistent within this entwinement

and maintain critical mass to have that sense of empathetic immersion throughout the entire experience so let's go back to some traditional approaches to how to tell visual stories and how to tell emotionally engaging moments we'll look at the first person camera the third person camera more traditional styles if any of you guys have motion sickness beware it's yours get in get in get in cool so let's ask ourselves how do we feel about this i definitely felt that was me right i was the protagonist that was really immersive i was very absorbed but i didn't really feel much for the protagonist there was no emotional connection for me there was no sympathy and if you guys noticed the protagonist was pushing their hand forward towards

their female counterpart trying to say something but they didn't speak and we'll get to why in a moment but that's actually a critical distinction a very big problem with the first person camera let's take a look at a third person camera and see how that makes us feel i said than mine see that's the one that put me in here oh yeah scrapbook 142. gonna watch out for those asgardians man they are hard to perish that's good hey hey hey do not zap me with that vet i just want to talk asgard is in danger cool so i definitely felt for them right there were characters in front of me i felt for their experience sympathy was definitely evoked in me but i wasn't there i was kind of like a fly on the wall experiencing this whole thing through my mind's eye so while i did

have sympathy i got a really big dip and deficit in my absorption so there's a problem here right the first person camera has the problem where we engage so deeply in that point of view that we can't have the protagonist speak or it feels like the words are being inserted into our brain and the first thing we do is we pop out of the experience we get a sense of mental and emotional dissonance so we can't really tell a deep emotional story in first person camera third person while it's really empathetic sorry sympathetic it's not absorbing enough so we can't actually get to sympathy with a traditional third-person camera so how do we push absorption onto the third-person camera to create a sense of empathy so our theory was this instead of thinking of it as a first person camera third person camera we're going to try to design from an emotional standpoint something like a first and a half person camera we're going to try to use the third person but bring the experience

from them to me in a sense combining absorption and sympathy to create a sense of empathetic immersion a sense that you are truly there engaging as yourself or as part of the team as we were experimenting with this uh state of empathetic immersion we're starting to kind of sputter with successes and and get a general idea of maybe where this can go we realized how fragile the state is it's kind of like running around with an egg on a spoon it's really easy to get a really small bump on your spoon and drop that egg the moment that egg is dropped it's very hard to reconstruct it put it back on the spoon and re-engage within that same experience but just because we come in with this superpower out of the gate with our sense of deep absorption with interactive media we have the potential to be probably one of the most powerful mediums for engaging storytelling so how does all this relate to god of war god of war starts

with a big problem it's steeped in fantasy in essence it says i am unreality we have dragons we have orcs we have ogres we have people that can lift mountains that's nothing we can relate to and as we were studying that sense of absorption that sense of being sucked into the content we realize that our ability to relate to our environment as something that we recognize is critical for us to actually be absorbed in the content so what we can do it's a got a bit of a problem we try to find another visual language that has the exact opposite problem that we do and in this case it wasn't actually a problem was a blessing we found the documentary style actually kind of calculated the documentary style for ourselves the documentary style has the visual approach of telling us that it is speaking the truth we are used to seeing it tell things that are true that are real

that are relatable so in essence we get a double boon we get a grounded experience which we're used to sing from documentary footage but we also get a very character relevant story that is character based which we're used to seeing documentary styles use so what we're trying to create is a sense of believable fantasy a sense that yes what i'm watching around me might not be as relatable but i believe it so all of us here i would take a wager that all of us here can hear with our eyes many different types of film language it's like growing up in a family that speaks a different language you might not be able to speak the language but when you hear it you completely understand it so we're leveraging that fact what we're telling the viewer from a visual standpoint is hey this is real we're calibrating their mindset to accept reality and once their shields

are down those shields we just were discussed then we hit them with a fantasy and they take the fantasy in reference to reality one of my favorite case studies for this was the exorcist from 1973 this movie didn't really use the documentary style used more of a family drama style we'll get back to the documentary shortly after this but this movie was so terrifying at the time even though it didn't use the amount of gore and shock other movies did just because it utilized these kind of techniques so let's take a look at what they did oh mom can't we get a horse well now oh we're in washington honey i don't know we'll see when we get home okay when could i have one we'll see reagan we'll see hey listen i'm part of limitations cool so really natural acting very natural lighting we feel like you

know this could be a part of our home videos right we are calibrating the viewers to relate to this as realistic content it is very relatable and the moment that brain is calibrated to relatable realism this happens the holy spirit by this sign of the holy cross of our lord jesus christ who lives and reigns with the father and the holy spirit amen god defenders [Music] we hit the view with heart so what we're doing is we're taking horror in the context of family drama we're breaking down the defenses against heart first and then horrifying the audience which is brilliant so we're essentially taking the documentary form

in the god of war again to bring in those absorption mechanics from that very raw documentary style on top of that third person camera to bring the relationship to the content from them to me that way instead of sympathizing with the character we're empathizing as the character so what was it in the documentary style we chose to latch on to from a visual standpoint for a start our camera never does anything that a human operator can't do and that was huge that was a huge boon to absorption because we never hit the spoon with something that we are not used to seeing in real life we also shot handheld style which is something that we're used to seeing with our smartphones and our home videos these are things that are realistic this is stuff that we're used to seeing every day our shot design from a lighting and environment design standpoint was very naturalistic we didn't go the whole soundstage hollywood style where all the

lights are painted and everything looks fully beautiful and controlled the world looks as it would look if it was like lit naturally and designed naturally the acting was moved away from the big shakespearean drama kind of style and move more towards a relatable character story from the way it was acted all of those were great bones to absorption but we also did something on a sympathy sympathy side we staged all the action with a focus on a subjective character experience and what does that mean every scene and this is mostly for the cinematic content the controlled content was owned and emotionally driven by a specific character that we knew and designed ahead of time every moment within the scene gave the viewer somebody to sympathize with and again that comes back from traditional cinematography on how to stain shots so they can stay sympathetic we never let you go from a sympathetic standpoint

you always had something to emotionally or somebody to emotionally relate to another detail we used on the camera side was to constantly keep the camera motivated to move and what does that mean as a camera operator i can move the camera because me as the camera operator is interested to see something what that does is it brings sympathy from the viewer to the camera operation and it takes it away from the people in front of the lens in front of the screen which are your heroes so we did our best to never use unmotivated camera work constantly motivate the camera by using motion tracking of motion in front of the scene following gazes and other little psychological nuances that help the camera need or want to move into a direction let's take a look at how a non-motivated camera looks and again if you guys have nausea any of you probably take a few seconds of this and look away this is pretty intense this is from

cloverfield 2008. oh my god so even though this was technically a third person experience the camera was so so much had a mind of its own that it was almost a first-person experience in essence that camera stole sympathy away from the heroes in front of the lens let's take a look at what we did on god of war this is from our e3 2016 trailer and this is a action sequence a combat sequence that are actually harder to design to stay motivated let's

see how these feel [Applause] no boys off the ice so the camera was moving around zooming around doing some crazy stuff but never in an unmotivated manner so if we did our job well and i believe we did you would never notice that there's a camera operator on set there you will just be focused on the action which brings us back to the idea of staging and blocking a scene if you do want to block a scene in a way that the camera stays invisible you can't just shoot it or film it

you have to think about how the action motivates your camera movements and plan for that ahead of time so let's move a little bit more towards the absorbing side of gameplay the part where your player actually has their hands on the stick and they're in control of the camera the interactive side so here we have opposite problem we have a problem where this is a very absorbing time of the game experience but can be very lacking in sympathy so how do we elevate that sense of sympathy on the interactive sides what we try to do is pretty much put ourselves in the mindset of shooting a scene and thinking as image makers and as visual storytellers what are the processes we are doing in order to make a certain moment feel a certain way quantify them and then proceduralize them on the interactive camera so an essence instead of having a narrative driven camera we're having a camera-driven

narrative so it's all about asking yourself questions of what is it in the world that i can use to latch onto in order to drive what in my camera is the weather going to make my camera shake more if i look at that deer are they going to look back and run away what is it that i can do to drive it and what we found is there are so many things you can do that as you start piling them onto the camera it starts distracting from the game experience it starts introducing chaos so the trick was how do we bring sympathy into this interactive moment in the game but still maintain order in order to do chaos so on the bottom here you can see it pretty traditional narrative style game and how it flows starts with an opening cinematic goes into some game play goes back into a cinematic either at the end of the level or when you achieve some form of achievement back into game play over and over until you are likely going to get a big cinematic for ending the game which what we try to do is take the

sympathetic parts of the game which are the cinematics and make them more absorbing and then take the absorbing parts of the video game and make them more cinematic more sympathetic and then we did something completely crazy we never cut the camera not cutting the camera was what allowed us to maintain a seamless transition from an emotional standpoint from our sympathetic moments to our absorbing moments and maintain that critical mass in order to fully achieve that sense of empathetic immersion throughout the entire game experience cuts are very jarring they're like a mental pop and while we do blink in our day-to-day lives blinking doesn't teleport us so we can't relate to cutting the moment we start cutting we start experiencing things more from our mind's eye more from a distance than from the actual personal experience

so in essence we are losing absorption and if we lose absorption we can't combine that with sympathy and we lose ei so hey let's not cut right no big deal uh that's pretty tough um as visual storytellers we are used to having certain tools in our back pocket to tell our visual story and as we started experiencing experiment experimenting with not cutting we found that it's like writing a novel without using punctuation or nouns you can't create establishing shots you can't cut to reactions you can't cut to inserts you can't use editing for pacing you can't use editing for clarity you can't cut in and out of your cinematics you can't cut between your prime lenses to get different types of emotions emotions from your lensing so how do we keep the content not only dynamic but emotionally engaging the reason i bolded cut to reaction the concept of the a b cut you know

cutting from one person to another is the bread and butter of sympathetic storytelling from a visual standpoint without that mechanic again we're left only with absorption and with absorption alone we can't have empathetic immersion so why is this mechanic so important from an emotional standpoint in order to maintain sympathy if you look at that little graph on the bottom left there and see that line of action between these two people talking and for a moment think of this line of action as a line of sympathy if i'm 90 degrees the line of sympathy my shot would be very detached and very objective it will tell me no emotional story it will just deliver the content you are looking at this is now happening i don't want to tell you how you feel about it that's a very flat emotionally relevant delivery it's not going to give us that sense of sympathy we need from prosthetic immersion as i start dialing that camera towards

the line of sympathy i start raising my sympathy towards the characters so the easiest thing to do is just dial two cameras to that highest point of sympathy and cut between them over a dialogue which would be the cleanest way to create a sympathetic delivery but we don't cut so let's look at this example this is a run-of-the-mill script we had to break down just an opening of one of the sequences and god of war in this moment kratos son was ill he had to leave his son with freya the witch in the woods and go get the thing that heals her heals him he brings it back freya thanks him for it does something with it he goes to his kid to check his temperature freya talks to him he talks to freya there's a whole bunch of back and forth a b dialogue with three characters one of them being mute so let's take a look at how that end up being solved you have it

back of your hand [Music] he's too ill [Music] i can break the fever but to heal he must know the truth of what he is so hopefully you guys feel that that was completely seamless and looked very effortless if not then then i'm not going to be happy right now um let's take a look at what we actually had to do to make this work you have it so we push in to a two opening shot we use freya's screen left motion to motivate the camera to move to give her her moment to establish her having business with this item then we use her screen right motion to reveal a three shot providing empathy between kratos and his son now we're both facing camera we can have a dialogue

he's still ill we give her motivation to leave her spot using her screen left motion with a zoom to give her her line having her screen right reveal kratos to give his bee delivery and we had over three and a half hours of this kind of content so uh good times thank you another challenge we had to encounter with this snow cut camera is something that is really quintessential to the god of war franchise and that that giant sense of scale okay this has always fought these giant mountain-sized creatures and monsters and the easiest way to make a hero feel small is to get them very far away from the camera make them very little next to something very very large how do we get our hero away from the camera and if we

actually managed to do that how do we bring him back to the camera without making it look like we're chasing after him and completely give the sympathy back to the camera operator so this is a talk in itself if you guys want to check out how we did it pick up the game i'm sure you guys can can find those spots and see how we did it on a technical standpoint we had to blend between our interactive moments and our non-interactive moments back into our interactive moments having having needing to do that right was critical to get that seamless experience to happen because if those transitions were jarring we would knock the spoon and we'd lose the egg so we had to blend navigation we had to blend animation camera animation in and out of combat and that was quintessential to keeping that egg on the spoon it's that was a nightmare in itself so how do we tackle this beast we use a lot of different techniques

i'm going to be focusing on a few today how we treated zooming how we treated visual defects how we treated handheld previz and then how we brought it all together on set working with the actors so zooming as we were studying some reference content trying to figure out how we're going to approach this we notice that people don't really zoom anymore they cut between prime lenses they cut for drama we had to actually go back to the drawing board and figuring out figured out what psychologically happens in a viewer when they witness a zoom what kind of zoom promotes what kind of emotion and not only that how to blend our zooms into the content because again we don't want to draw attention to the camera operation so the zooms have to be completely invisible what we ended up doing is breaking zooms into two utilities one zooming for utility meaning i have to go from one place to another maybe a zoom will help me and two zooming for emotional impact and

emotional content so let's take an example for a zoom for utility here this is going back to our 2016 demo we already watched the scene you guys probably didn't notice that we had a pretty crazy zoom here let's take a quick look now boy i guess i hope you didn't notice i had a big zoom in here um what we did here we use a really wide 24 millimeter lens to exasperate that big impact when kratos slams that troll into the ice to get that drama we need it from a wide angle lens but then we need to be 20 feet behind action within probably a matter of a second and a half to get over the kid's shoulder when he draws the arrow so we did we dollied the camera back as we were zooming in which essentially maintained cradles on screen in the same size he was making you feel like there's no camera

movement well we're actually trucking the camera 20 feet back let's take a look at that again in slow motion look at how that environment in the background compresses as the camera zooms we're 20 feet behind him now let's look at an emotional content zoom in this scene kratos starts off his you know traditional standard mean kind of tough dad very impersonal shot 24 millimeter wide and very quickly after that we transitioned to kratos having one of probably the only two intimate moments he has within the game and that's gathering the ashes of his wife that he just cremated we ended up pushing all the way to 120 millimeters to get that sense of intimacy and compressed internal space this is actually the biggest zoom range we did in the game what we also noticed is in order to hide a zoom but still make it emotionally impactful we can kind of slap it on some motion

that the character does utilizing the motion to convey the zoom and if it's designed well that motion also conveys what the character is emotionally going through in this case it's a walk from his son after he dismisses his son to walking towards his wife's cremation site let's take a look at how that looks [Music] 120 millimeters [Music] and then of course we have to find our way back right that's a different story so approach to visual defects we actually worked pretty hard to make our visuals look worse the whole thing

came from the problem of the uncanny valley and for those of you who are not familiar with the uncanny valley the traditional thought would say that if something looks better then it looks more believable kind of like in a linear manner the more believable the more relatable what actually happens is when something becomes very close to realistic our psyche starts judging it in a very harsh manner it looks for realism and it finds all the defects there is a giant deep dip in believability just before you hit photo realism and because of the power of our game engine these days and our amazing tech render teams and our amazing art teams we fell right in the middle of the uncanny valley so what we try to do is go back to the documentary style and find things that we relate to as realistic footage and slap on top of the image to try to at least if not completely skip over the uncanny valley kind of make it less more shallow less deep

so we added film grain we added handheld we added crap hitting your lens all over the place lens flare chromatic aberration we slipped on focus all these things that if you were a filmmaker shooting live action you would try at all costs to avoid but what it did is again spike our brains and calibrate them toward a sense of realism and helped us skip over the uncanny valley and relate to the footage without pushing back against it and then having a giant dip in absorption a quick note on that having a very strong understanding on how lenses real world lenses work how film backs work how photo senses work how images actually get created in what fashion allowed us to do this in a very realistic manner not just by slapping some elements on the lens and or on the screen in our case and hoping to achieve a sense of realism so our approach to handheld that was a

big big boon for us in terms of getting that raw absorption i've heard a lot of people approach handheld as this kind of programmatic wobble on the screen and nothing can be further from the truth each handheld has its own style not all handhelds are created equal sometimes blends of handhelds are needed in order to create a certain emotion and drive a certain sense we actually went on to the mocap stage and shot our handhelds on the bottom left here you can see me and mocap stage well footage generated by me on a mocap stage holding the camera and trying to keep it steady on the far right you can see me on a treadmill jogging in a mocap studio trying to keep my camera steady to really get your your handhelds to feel correct and really help bridge things like the uncanny valley or help calibrate the viewers into a

documentary style you have to treat them with the same amount of care and seriousness that you treat your character animations what we did find is that handheld is incredibly nauseating and as somebody who for the first six months of his work on god of war had dramamine on his desk i was very passionate about this we had to figure out how to take our handheld wholesale and wrap it in some form of ui that allows the viewer to either calibrate it up or down to match their personal user experience while still maintaining that emotional need that handheld provides from a documentary standpoint what we also found is in order to diminish the nausea and diminish the motion a little bit thinking of handheld from a rotational and translational standpoint separately was incredibly critical the rotations controlled the movement of

the world and how it bops up and down and around us while the translations controlled the parallax of the foreground separating those two allowed us to massage the data maintain it looking realistic but lower its sense of nausea so on the far left we can see the raw jog motion that we shot on stage on the center you can see us blending it down a little bit with a combination of rotation and translation and on the far right you can see that actual data being applied to a jog in the game what you'll also notice is that movement on the screen has a major factor to diminishing your perception of handheld so that's something you have to account for when you're blending in your handheld data so back to this design of the no cuts previz was critical we previous revised it previously again the idea is to make all your mistake where it's fast and where it's cheap don't go instead

and try to make your mistakes there and also you don't have to use super high end methods of prives like hand keep previous in 3d or rough mocap find the right element and style of previz you need in order to deliver what the shot needs to look like find your designs find your blocking find your staging find it quickly and quickly enough for you to be able to iterate on it within the production timelines and again if you don't have previz do not go on set we did try that it wasn't pretty so let's take a look at a previous example this was shot with a dslr using a lens that roughly represented the focal lengths we were wanting for that specific scene we shot this with our cinematic animation crew erica pinto umberto bossie and aviyani and i found that animators are great to work with and they have a lot of fun doing it i do as well let's take a look at how this scene looked

what is that you'll know right [Music] where are you so again working with your teammates is awesome we had a lot of fun shooting the scene uh we slapped it together put it into after effects just to get some lighting cues some audio cues just to find the mood of the scene but we found exactly what we needed to

do to make the scene work we found the blocking the staging where to hide the zooms how to stage the scene to properly emotionally deliver so now let's see how it actually looks like in the game so [Music] oh so virtually identical which is great um it means that we know what we're doing on set we know how to design this ballet between the camera and the actors what

the actors need to be doing with the camera needs to be doing when at what pacing and we don't have to figure all that out on set which makes shooting really really really comfortable one thing to keep in mind though about well some things to keep in mind about previz if possible at least for me refrain from pre-visiting in a three-dimensional software that idea of needing to use a skill set in order to explore a shot already takes you one step away from cleanly exploring your concepts if you can explore all your scenes in your mind draw them down in quick thumbnails and then only go into the 3d software where you're trying to figure out if what you visualized actually works i find i get much better and much more interesting results just because of the real realism of game production we don't always have the environments that we're going to shoot in ready when we need to shoot so by all means if you can

try avoiding that temptation of shooting generic and what's a generic mean oh we'll just shoot or design or animate based on our characters based on where the camera is going to go then we're just going to take that whole thing and just plop it into an environment it's going to look great it won't you have to think about how the environment is going to look like in your shot you have to think about what your characters are going to be touching where they're going to be sitting without that level of interaction with your environment your scenes are going to be flat and you're going to lose a sense of absorption and you will not be able to create a pathetic immersion so find a good cadence with your level designers and your concept artists and your level artists and see if you can find a way to roughly thumb out areas that will give you what you need in order to drive your scenes forward without pushing the production timeline beyond what it can go the bottom line is if you really bust your butt and work like crazy and it looks like you've done nothing and things look completely natural

you're on to something so how to take this whole thing and work with the actors rehearsal was key for us actors already have a lot of their minds they have to find the character they have to memorize their lines especially in a winner because in a winner they have to memorize all their lines for the scene it's not per cut and not per shot so if they now have to memorize the choreography of what they need to be doing on top of their lines and trying to perform you're not going to get a good performance out of them so incorporating that rehearsal and trying to get them to incorporate the ballet was very comfortable for them to then take that information on set and focus on acting as the shot designer you have to always keep in mind that you want to give your actors the pro the freedom to perform and surprise you on set you don't want to tie their hands so tight that you tell them exactly what to

do and when or why you're bringing them in in the first place so it's always a matter of finding that balance designing things in a way that will be evocative but letting your actors do what they are there to do having the camera itself on set with the actors is also a huge bonus actors kind of have a broken psychological approach to how they look at the set around them they have one side looking at their actors different actors uh working with directors and working with the actual emotional content but they always have a mind on where the camera is it allows them to dial in the performance is this going to be a facial performance is going to be a full body performance what am i emoting with is it my voice is it my full body without that you're just gonna get performances that constantly feel like they're stage performances and that's not gonna squeeze out the kind of drama you can get from what the actors can do what we did find though is that tight close-up scenes which are supposed to be

the most dramatic ones and they are are the trickiest ones because you have to use the actor's motion in order to motivate the camera to move and keep it looking seamless so we have to dictate to the actors a lot more of what to do within their performance and thankful we had really understanding actors that totally understood the challenge so they were totally game to do this but again it's a matter of finding that balance let's take a look at a close-up scene and how those look this weapon any weapon comes from here but only when tempered by earth discipline the self-control of the one who wields it that is where the true strength of a warrior lies you must never forget so every head bob head nod hand gesture posture and positioning was explicitly

designed in the scene just because the scene was so tight and again that was much more challenging in order to create that balance and allow our performance to perform so some key takeaways from from this process from this attempt and hopefully successful attempt to create a really engaging and empathetic continuous experience from a level design and art standpoint approaching your designs like disneyland design is incredibly helpful use your environments to hide and reveal content that has emotional impact to your storyline just lay things out in a way that they are open for exploration and game content think of the story they deliver from a lighting standpoint we need to start looking beyond the idea of lighting for clarity lighting for guidance or lighting for beauty but we actually have to think of lighting as a tool to tell an emotional story

and again that goes back to traditional cinematography from a writing standpoint the idea of taking your writers and putting them somewhere and taking your game designers and putting them somewhere else and at the end combining everything together and everything is going to be great we got to get past that your writers need to work in lockstep with your game designers and your level designers and your disney designs in order to go beyond the idea of just designing for plot points but for character arcs for how things actually relate to each other from a gameplay and a narrative standpoint from an animation point of view and this is mostly from the cinematic animation side we have over a hundred years of filmmaking to draw from and understand how they took visual content to drive emotional delivery while not all these techniques are 100 percent applicable to game design each of them has some level of wisdom that we can utilize and help to elevate our emotional

content through our game cinematography we have to bring in those dedicated disciplines in our teams we have to bring in that training if you want to hear a little bit more about this you should go to erica pinto's talk tomorrow she will be discussing these kinds of issues more from the animation side of cinematic animation she's our cinematic animation lead from a team alignment standpoint if you do want to hit a goal as crazy as not cutting a camera you have to think of the impact it has for every single one of the teams that are going to be engaged within this challenge you have to get buy-in from each one of these teams early and you have to design pipelines that will allow you to track data between all of these teams not just internally within one team on its own and again going back to previz having a very clear visual target that helps everybody moving in the same direction is going to be critical i'm incredibly proud of what we did in a

god of war i really feel like we pushed some very heavy envelopes but this kind of media can go far far beyond the idea of empathetic immersion we have to really grab the kind of tech that's at our it's at our doorstep we're going to be able to render photorealism in the very near future we have to challenge the norms and evolve our media we truly have the capability of being one of the most emotionally engaging modes of emotional delivery we have both the means and the tools to be a new type of art form thank you [Music] any questions how you doing uh uh great talk a lot of great information there i just had a quick question ahead during production did you develop

any specific hardware to help you with this type of these movements i know and behind the scenes stuff i've seen the handheld camera you're using but if there was any specifics that uh that you were able to share i'm curious yeah absolutely so the concept of virtual cinematography is has been out for a while uh we just explored with different types of rigs on virtual cameras on how to comfortably get the kind of visual data we wanted from holding a system um and then figure out how to take that and utilize it in our animation pipeline i would say we took about probably a couple of months to dial that in but honestly it's just like designing any other camera rig it's just instead of recording an image or recording motion cool thank you hi i'm curious on uh how different your techniques were uh or similar for uh scenes that were

during interactive moments in the game because i recall there was one scene in particular in helheim when they were climbing past baldur and he was like giving like a monologue um that stuck out to me and and it was during an interactive moment so i was wondering if the techniques you use are similar right those techniques are actually very different those moments are probably the hardest to design because you want to both control the image and allow the viewer the sense of exploration so that goes back into level design we designed the environment in a way that by exploring it we know where you're going to be looking and we designed it in a way that it's going to show and hide based on some measured cadence the moments we wanted to show from the actual visual story thank you hello hi i actually wanted to know about the previous work you did for uh the dragon fighting scene like i wanted to know how that would that was

done did you create some sort of a 3d model for that like how did he do it which scene the dragon fighting scene oh the dragon fighting scenes actually that was done heavily by our gameplay animators those scenes are driven very heavily by combat design once the beats of the scene are kind of locked down that's when my team comes in and polishes up the visuals to make sure they speak within the same visual language but again those are heavily driven by level design and combat to make sure that the gameplay is fun and then that it also delivers the right visual story okay thank you hey hi did you at one point uh made some tests or something to check if the one or the one take thing is really the right approach did you did you try to shoot some scenes with cuts or did you like [ __ ] it right i mean man i wish i could

um the mandate to not cut actually came from corey our game director he didn't tell us how to do it he just told us told us just do it so uh i could never just go hey you know what screw this i'm just gonna start cutting again i can tell you there were many times i very much wanted to um but um it all all the tests we did were always towards making sure that the winner's gonna work cool first of all thank you so much for making such a beautiful game um i have question about analytics and the empathy and emotional connection to the game so were you able to analyze whether the users or gamers having the emotional connection that you expected so based on the scenario you expected oh they're gonna cry at this point

were you able to analyze based on analytics right so we didn't have quantified analytics for the emotional side that's something that i believe we're going to be pushing a little bit more into but we did use our team as guinea pigs so we try to work when we did push a scene toward a level of completion in some level of isolation so we have enough people to be able to view it and gauge their engagement and sometimes we did get feedback that it's not impactful enough and it was up to us and the experience we bring in to figure out how to fix that thank you hi so you mentioned early on that your uh you called it a theory of how you can blend the uh immersion in the game and empathy um to create something special for players i was curious if there was a moment where you felt like that theory was proved in the development cycle for you whether it was a certain scene or a certain challenge your team was going

through anything like that right honestly it's really hard to quantify it's easier to find when it breaks than when it works as weird as that may sound a good example would be the moment again our e3 trailer was when we put our things out there to see if if they work within the e3 trailer there was a moment where the sun kills a deer and that was a moment that was both immersive and sympathetic and we wanted to see if it brought people to tears and uh thankfully it did so for me that was one of the moments where i knew that we're probably on to something we can make this work yeah you need an audience test yes that's always the case yeah thank you okay hi um i was just wondering since you said that there's a few times that you really wanted to cut or was like a really difficult moment

for you to follow this rule oh if i can oh man like the most difficult if nothing else i don't think i can think of the most difficult when it's difficult it's just difficult the scene i showed you as an example that opening scene opening moment for the scene where freya uses the heart to heal the sun that was so incredibly difficult and that was just the beginning of the scene we even came up with ideas on how to cut of course we never did it but i would say that would be a good example thank you i was curious just so much of the feel and flow of the game is based around this camera work but you said a lot of the or most of the camera work came from the mocap sessions traditional game development mocap doesn't usually get integrated until a lot later on so i was wondering during development i imagine there's large areas that didn't have this data yet did it make it difficult to test and play the game and see if it was feeling good if you didn't have a lot of this camera stuff coming in until later

absolutely so again that goes back to i touched upon that a little briefly we did everything we could to get something from the environment artist or level designers or or any other team that has to do with a world building to give us context of what it is we're going to be shooting in um and then we use that in our previz so we try to find the best way we could based on based on what we had at hand to figure out how the scene is going to feel and then it was up to us to make sure we maintain that vision throughout the entire production when the environments come in when the final characters come in but we knew how it was going to look way beforehand if that answers your question it mostly does i was more curious like how for the rest of the team who was waiting to see your stuff in the game i guess like how it was affecting them having it being probably not there especially if the your previz was not done in 3d software

so you couldn't just stick the previs into the game right having said that there are solutions for that as well but it was mostly verbal communication for for god of war uh it was about just staying very tight within the teams thanks hello hey uh quick question on so one of the big downsides of a oner is the is basically the shoe leather that you have to kind of fill between were you intimate in conversations with the writing team and the production design team when you're blocking out scenes to kind of cut the fat between moments to make the scenes not feel as drawn out right um it was definitely a challenge in the beginning our writers never wrote four runners but as you were starting to do back and forth very very early on in production they found their way to find that cadence by knowing how i approached their content so as production picked up it was mostly about hey maybe we can take that line

and move it down because then i can motivate the camera better but other than that it was all about finding business for the character in order to fill in these moments and maintain pacing and that's when blocking really really was critical hi um did you create any like 2d animatics like with storyboards or did you mainly go straight to live action so we did try what we did find is because there is so much camera movement and such complex camera movement to do a warner it is i wouldn't say virtually impossible but incredibly difficult to portray that in 2d it was really really critical for us to find the exact moments and compositions where people end up in real world space and we found that if the storyboard artist was too loose they might paint us into corners we can't actually do because we can't just use shot to shot

to shot so we tried it and it turned out to be more time consuming than any other previous option we had we end up not doing it hi uh for emotional immersion of the player or of the audience i wanna kind of talk about three mediums first textbooks or like novels where player feels the immersion very deeply because all of there is a imagination of a player but player or reader can't really control the antagonist or protagonist right so there it kind of breaks the immersion or like there there there is some desire to be left there for games where player actually controls the person they are playing but now the creator also gets a chance to represent the the scene how they want to be presented which we have seen with god of four and many other awesome games

so now here there is immersion as well as control both from the player and now upcoming failed upcoming technology which is going towards vr and virtual reality you you you you are feeling more and more immersive in in virtual world but now creator lose the control over the camera and how the camera actually is authored there do you think how it do you think it would affect largely on immersion because it kind of feels like for a long time video games as as a medium of as a medium of entertainment is going to be on a pinnacle of giving like highest immersion and highest connection compared to this other two so what are your thoughts on it so to understand your question you you want to uh see how videos might move forward to push immersion especially talking about virtual reality

where you actually lose the control over camera right so virtual reality is a pretty separate topic yeah um virtual reality is not only a first person experience but it is your experience i don't think that a controlled experience like traditional cinematics would ever work in vr also we can't change the camera aspect in vr because it has to represent how we actually view the world with our own eyeballs so our thought of vr as cinematography is very different and that goes a little bit more towards what i was talking about in terms of a camera driven narrative based on where the player is and what the player is looking at we can bring the world to life based on their choices um but that's going to be a little different than traditional cinematography where we do control lensing and do control things that if you controlled in vr you will really disorient the player makes sense so last question i was wondering what

was the sign of process and on this project how much do you have to reshoot and in this project yeah how much did we need to reshoot yeah and what was the sign of process so we pretty much showed our prives to the directors they got to sign off the moment we got signed off from the previz we just did our best to get the previz shot properly on set and at that point there was merely any reshoot thank you awesome thank you guys you