One of the first characters players see in Mario 64
isn’t the titular plumber - it’s this little fella, Lakitu.
And he’s operating a video camera. In a completely normal way.
Mario 64 was innovative for many reasons, but none more so than its third person camera.
It was such a revolutionary idea at the time, that Nintendo
made sure that players could see the ‘camera’ that they’d be controlling throughout the game.
That’s right, you’re playing as Mario… and his camera operator.
Since then, video games have only become more cinematic, and so have their cameras.
Developers have looked to movies and TV for inspiration to make their cameras feel more real – but they can
only copy how cameras look.
How cameras actually work in games is completely different,
and allows for some truly wild things movie directors can only dream of...
...with a generous CGI budget.
In fact, after decades of games being influenced by movies,
it's now filmmakers who are being inspired by the style and techniques of games.
But in order to understand these influences, you’ve gotta start with
the basics, and when it comes to cameras it doesn’t get more basic than “what’s in frame”?
Framing is an essential component in the language of film.
It’s what you see… and what you don’t.
Generally it’s broken down into the wide, medium, and close up.
A super wide shot can demonstrate a character’s insignificance or alienation.
while an extreme close up can highlight their inner struggle.
And video games often use framing the exact same way.
See how the camera swoops in extra close on Lara here?
The game camera designer framed the shot this way, to emphasize her panic and claustrophobia.
Just like a cinematographer would.
The difference is that game camera designers have something else to worry about:
you.
They have to balance aesthetics with the fact that players have their grubby little gamer hands on the camera.
Oftentimes, developers try to make the camera outsmart the player. In Abzu, AKA wet Journey,
the camera can detect when a player is trying to pull off a loop-de-loop and pull out wide
enough to see the whole maneuver… instead of nauseatingly following the character upside down.
But even these smart cameras aren’t a one size fits all framing solution.
Take Marvel’s The Avengers. It has six playable heroes of
radically different bigness, which demands a completely different camera for each.
And Hulk, for instance, is a fucking anomaly. He creates so many issues.
This is Nico Clairmont, who is not the Hulk’s supervillain nemesis.
He’s a camera designer at Crystal Dynamics, and part of his job is to be on the lookout
for anomalies that might prevent the camera from properly framing the action.
That means coding specialized cameras for different types of gameplay, but also making
the framing more in line with the way it’s done in films.
There’s a reason movies tend to show us character’s faces instead of their butts:
the face is what most of us empathize with.
Most of us anyway.
But the standard third person camera is almost exclusively butt-facing
even though all the action is happening on the other side of dat ass.
This is something Nico knows well. To improve the way he frames combat sequences,
he turned to films.
I remember studying, as case study, all sorts of film,
like Ip Man I watched so many times,
300, Spartacus.
I studied the the cinematography and how
they shot fight sequences.
All of those little cinematic techniques, I used to create that sense of film in games.
In Marvel’s Avengers, the camera knows when you’re in combat and will subtly shift the
framing to give you a more triumphant view of your character and their heroic punches.
But this is Marvel’s Avengers
not Marvel’s THE Avengers.
Player agency is important, which is why Nico added a bail out function that fires the virtual camera operator,
and hands camera control back to the player with a simple touch of the right analog stick.
When my camera becomes hijacked, I get anxiety.
You should always be allowed to be your own cameraman.
Controlling the framing isn’t just a matter of moving the camera closer or farther away.
It also depends on the lens.
In real life, lenses let you zoom in and out,
change the field of view,
and most importantly, manipulate what’s in focus.
That last part is actually not easy to do in video games because they have such a hard time replicating
depth of field.
This determines which parts of the image are in focus and which parts are blurry.
It’s an effect that even the lenses in our eyes are subject to, so you’ll actually see
it in a lot of first person games.
And it’s used in films to signify what you should be looking at.
For a game to realistically depict depth of field, it would have to calculate all the different paths
light is taking into the camera’s ‘lens’, something computers can’t quite handle yet,
but we’re getting pretty close!
For now, developers just do it in post.
And it actually works a lot like the portrait mode in your smartphone.
It's really hard for the wide angle lens on
these devices can’t create that shallow depth of field naturally.
Instead, while the phone is capturing the image, it also captures the ‘depth’ of the frame,
and pretty much drops a photoshop blur on everything that’s not you.
Likewise, video games use software to simulate a depth of field that real camera lenses simply can’t achieve.
Games only have to treat their lenses like a physical object
when they want to. Like when they throw water or mud or blood on it.
with Gears of War, especially the chainsaw, we're trying to strike that almost cartoon
inspired level of comedic violence, and you know, if you go look at a lot of cartoons, it is like
gratuitous things, you know, kind of breaking the fourth wall of blood spotting on the cameras.
Ray Davis worked on the Gears of War series, which was entirely built around
its cinematic third person camera.
In this case, throwing a little blood on it
took the chainsaw fatality from viscerally uncomfortable to hilariously over-the-top.
Gears of War used splatter effects to emphasize the physicality of the camera,
But they also had another trick to draw you into the game; movement.
We’re used to game cameras latching onto our shoulders and staying put.
But look at how this camera moves during Epic’s spicy take on sprinting, the roadie run.
the original inspiration was the CNN battlefield cameraman,
you know, the guy that's on the warfront, like running into cover into the foxholes.
This effect was meant to limit the player’s perspective while immersing them in the game’s
“war is hell” chaos.
At first they tried to make it just like the real thing.
our director at the time, he strapped up in the mocap suit and they had like a prop camera
and he ran across the mocap studio like he was following a dude in the battlefield.
And funny enough, when we put that raw footage in I think it made everybody immediately sick!
That beta version of the ‘roadie run’ was just a little too real, but the idea was spot on.
Shaking the camera added impact by evoking the feeling of a war documentary.
Camera movement is an area where games don’t have to play by real life rules.
A video game camera can act like a drone, shift into a tracking shot,
pass through a wall, and then shoot up into the sky.
Real movie cameras might not be able to do all those things,
cause it's physically impossible,
but that doesn’t mean cinematographers don’t try.
One of the ways they flex their creative muscles is with the “one shot”,
which is a long take without any discernible transitions.
The lack of cuts makes it easier to become immersed in the scene…
unless you’re a film nerd like me
and then the only thing you can think about is
“How did the camera move through that car?”
One shots require precise, complicated camera movements.
No whoopsies. Surely that’s easier to do in video games, right?
Well if it were, you’d probably see more than just a handful of games attempt it.
In Dead Space 2, the camera almost never leaves Isaac’s side, whether he’s engaging in combat or managing his inventory.
It immerses you, the player, in the same terrifying situations that he’s facing.
The difficulty for long takes in film is moving the camera while hiding an entire production team.
Games on the other hand are trying to move their cameras while hiding loading screens and jarring
transitions from gameplay to cutscene, all while following a player who could be standing anywhere.
It's maddening for most of the people on the team, the environment artists,
as well as the technical programmers, everybody, because
it all has to be timed so perfectly.
You might recognize Cory Barlog as the director of God of War, a game whose
defining feature was its one shot.
Barlog was inspired by this specific scene in Hardboiled,
which effortlessly mixed quiet character moments with over-the-top action, all in a single shot.
While they may seem a little like Hollywood over indulgence, they do
serve a purpose in filmmaking:
they replicate the way we actually experience the world,
in real time, without cuts.
And in games specifically — where the protagonist and player are one in the same,
it makes sense that more of them are starting to adopt the one-shot style.
There's a sense of immediacy that we get from it, that the journey is important,
and even the small details are important
You get a connection with this character to never feel like oh,
I'm trying to track several different characters.
It's more like, no, this is a journey.
The one shot breaks down the distinction between gameplay and cutscene,
and show how far video game cameras have come. And those innovations are working
their way right back into the films and television that inspired them.
CGI effects allow directors to move their cameras pretty much wherever they want,
limited only by their special effects budget.
In order to preserve the human element of their craft,
filmmakers look to motion capture, a technology used extensively in video games
long before Gollum’s award winning performance.
Films like Avatar pushed this technology forward. Director James Cameron used virtual cameras to
see his motion-captured actors as giant blue aliens in real time.
The camera was so cutting edge that only four existed.
Three were being used on Avatar.
The fourth was used for Resident Evil 5.
Today’s virtual productions feel even more like a mix of games and movies.
Much of The Mandalorian was filmed on a special set with giant, high resolution LED screens
and dynamic backgrounds that place the performers in an accurately rendered 3D scene.
When the camera moves, the background changes perspective with it.
And it’s all done in real time - just like a video game level.
And I mean that literally:
Epic’s Unreal game engine,
yes, that unreal game engine - made this possible.
Epic’s engineers were on set, working closely with the show’s director and cinematographer
to adjust the backgrounds for each scene.
The end result wasn’t just seamless for the audience at home, but a more immersive
experience for the actors,
who are used to working in front of a blank green screen.
I have no idea what that’s like.
This “virtual set” technique is already starting to make its way into bigger productions.
But it’s not just game technology that’s changing how directors make movies;
their look and style is also starting to influence cinematography.
The intimate, over the shoulder perspective is common in video games,
not so much in film. But it’s seen throughout 1917, the epic war film which,
like God of War—was meant to show an entire journey from start to finish in one shot.
Sam Mendes, the director of 1917, was captivated by watching his children play Red Dead Redemption.
He wanted the audience to “feel like you were there with the characters.”
Instead of looking to films for that feeling, he turned to video games.
Today, most of the inspiration still flows in the opposite direction.
We’ve had nearly a century of movies and television defining what a camera should look like.
But the balance is shifting.
Today’s game directors grew up on film. What are tomorrow’s filmmakers growing up on right now?
It’s Fortnite, they’re all playing Fortnite.