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Beyond Machinima: Rudy Poat and John Gaeta on the Future of Interactive Cinema
JG: Yes, interactivity is definitely an addictive force that engages your brain in a different way and can expand your mind, or it can do the opposite. Either way it has a far deeper reach. The question is: how do we actually fuse the best qualities of game and film into a hybrid? I think that could be a phenomenal third place that not everyone has to pursue, but there's a whole new order of entertainment experience that can come out of it. GS: I was talking to Rudy and he mentioned that you can have several people working on a project at once. Did you guys do that with Trapped Ashes? JG: Rudy has built it that way, but I've only ever done that with just him. The real gist of it, what's meaningful to me as a creative, is that I can compose, or very rapidly keyframe, at HD resolutions. Of course, this is Rudy's territory. We're trying to work out a new way to visualize our film content as fast as possible but at also as high fidelity as possible so that we have an understanding of what we're gonna get at the other end. You're accustomed to some of the shots I've worked on having hundreds and hundreds of layers, this does not. This is much more minimal by comparison. It really only features one real element, the baby, and it's environment, which is procedurally generated, is less important than our composition on this one element. We've chosen what I consider a baby step towards a process in which we conceive, animate, compose and render as simple as we possibly could just to make it to the other side. Being able to output to film alone was a Herculean achievement on Rudy's part. That alone was something we weren't clear that we were going to be able to do, we were prepared to do it more traditionally.
It's not a very big project, probably 20 shots or less, high teens, of a very reasonable, straight forward moving camera composition. It had some beautiful cameras and lighting, but in general we're not talking about twenty cars and stunt guys, right? GS: Right. JG: He and I are basically more along the lines of real time composition, simple animation, like the limbs of the baby will twitch and things on that order. For us, it was a conceptual starting point for doing that on film. GS: So you see this cutting down render time? JG: Oh, of course, absolutely. It's the question of how many elements at what quality level for what purpose of visualization. Is it a subset of a larger project? Is this what quality level you'll be outputting? The reason, to go back to the beginning, which is why I said all this, that I find this topic so interesting is that we're inside a womb. It's a very fascinating universe to begin with. Then we make these scenes where the baby twitters as if it's aware of the outside world, and whether it's reacting to sound or whatever. It's this freakish commentary on whether the unborn child is aware of its outside universe or not. We found it interesting from a concept point of view and we thought "what if we made this content in a way that later people could move around this environment in the exact same quality." Along the way we decided to build in some additional AI attributes like if the camera gets to a certain proximity there's some reaction, or with the outside world you can control the lights. Essentially, though, it's the exact same content that was put to film at one point, looking the same but navigable. GS: Ok, and I… JG: How you feeling about this conversation so far? GS: I think it's fascinating. JG: I'm just trying to gauge on whether or not you think this is interesting or if you think I'm full of it. GS: Not at all. JG: To boil it down, right, because I've done things large and small, what I've learned through the years is that when we get into real time cinema, navigational cinema and the future of next generation games. Those are lofty phrases. You potentially get yourself into a position where people think "I don't know if we can pay forty million dollars to make this game. First of all we don't know what real time cinema is. We don't know what navigational cinema is. We don't know if people will like it. We have no idea." Questions abound. The type of franchises, companies and developers that we want to make these games, like the Half-Life guys or whoever you like, you have to think it's a difficult business decision to make because it's so large. GS: It's risky. |
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