48 FEATURE GAMES ENGINES
• Subsequent reuse Remember I said that asset creation is essentially unchanged? Well let’s say I want to go back to that same location and shoot another short film. Much like a standing set in episodic TV work these real-time locations are live, we can go back and quickly shoot new episodes without the expensive cost of assets. And sure, any CG production could boast the same, but again, the biggest time savings happen in shot production, not assets, and since we just cut out assets, these reuse cases can be incredibly fast to create. Def: What is the advantage of using a game engine? What has changed to make this process so current? CH: Aside from all the things I already mentioned, because the time savings question really wasn’t just about time savings, the point of all of it is the creativity it can afford you. Another example is the big picture it can provide to individual team members.
• Creative exploration Because things are so fast –
essentially the film is just ‘live’ – you can experiment in ways you normally never could. Often one might have an idea, but the implications of testing it are too expensive either in time or money. So you are limited to a smaller subset (either in the number of creative iterations or scope of said iterations) of exploration you can do. A simple real-world example from this project is that we were struggling with the aesthetics of the harsh noonday sun we had initially planned for the film to be lit by. So we tried something; in the space of one hour a single artist did a time-of-day wedge (noon, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm) and output the results. We reviewed them and picked the one we liked the most. Being able to just tweak and play creatively like that is amazing. So often waiting for results can get in the way of creative freedom. This helps to take those barriers down and it’s not just lighting, it’s layout, cameras, etc.
Artists are often stuck in their own little box, focused just on their task and how it affects the immediacy of things around it, seeing only a tiny picture of the whole. In the real-time environment any artist at any time can publish what they are working on and see it in the context of the entire film with all other aspects as well. It gives them much greater exposure to how their decisions and work can influence the work as a whole. And that’s pretty awesome. What’s changed: a lot really. First of all, I think we have to stop calling
ABOVE Unity allows the whole film to remain ‘live’ as it’s worked on.
DEFINITION MARCH 2018
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook