Saturday, February 22, 2020

Now Loading...

Nobody likes staring blankly at loading screens.  Because of this game developers are perpetually struggling against hardware limitations to create as seamless an experience as possible.  In current gen titles this tends come up most often in the form of open world or linear action/adventure titles.  Of course, there's a balancing act between graphics and performance as well.  Aside from frame rate drops, stumbles often come in the form of geometry or texture pop-in.  One way to avoid these kinds of hiccups is to hide the transitions.  Squeezing that player character through long narrow passages, having them ride an elevator, forcing them to walk slowly when normally they can run...these are just some of the tricks employed.  They aren't perfect solutions, but it can be one method of pushing more out of the hardware available.  What's interesting about all this is how it has influenced film making.  Particularly, the way in which the Oscar award winning movie "1917" uses tricks similar to video games in order to achieve its one-shot technique.

Obviously, "1917" isn't the first film to do this sort of thing.  Alfred Hitchcock's black and white motion picture "Rope" is probably one of the first examples in modern cinema history.  More recently movies such as "Hardcore Henry" and "Birdman" have also utilized the one continuous take.  "1917" represents this style of film making in that, aside from one deliberate hard cut, the movie follows the main character from opening fade in to ending credits.  Unlike the drama film "Russian Ark" though "1917" was not actually shot in one take.  In fact the longest sequence is only about seven minutes in length.  The transitions are carefully disguised (sometimes with subtle use of CGI).  A few of these stitches are easy to spot; such as when the camera passes through a doorway or an object in the foreground obscures the view.  However, most of them are pretty well hidden, the way a skilled video game designer would hide the loading taking place when the player transitions their character into a new location.

Another aspect of "1917" that feels reminiscent of game design is the compression of physical spaces.  In games this is done because of memory limitations, or due to the boredom that comes with traversing terrain for extended periods of time.  In order to avoid uninteresting downtime "1917" unnaturally compresses in a way that feels very similar to video game environments.  Add to this the third-person camera view, that occasionally pans around the characters as they advance ever forward, and it creates a similar feeling to what one might get watching a Let's Play of the newest God of War.

I've seem people complain online that the one-shot take in "1917" is a gimmick.  I understand where they are coming from, but when you think about it isn't editing shots a gimmick too?  Assuming they're conscious, humans experience the world in real time.  So, in that sense certain genres of video games mimic reality more closely than standard film making techniques.  That's not to say movies should always strive to imitate reality...and yet, if the goal is to emphasis immersion then there is definitely something to be said for hiding the cuts made on-screen.

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