Many shots come to mind for what was a very personal endeavour to turn this game into
into a large scale movie project.
From the first version, released as chapters in the SunlightMaggot channel,
to the final cut version once I could find a proper, working free camera,
and the almost endless possibilities it brought along.
I'll be dividing my favourite shots in three categories.
First there would be the composition or framing aspect,
the quality of the shots, or in other words, the purity of an image.
There are many shots I'd pick, from the prologue to the last chapter.
My favourite is the Man Eater shell staring into Ash Lake.
Second, the composite shots.
I discovered the effect 'feathered crop', and a whole world of possibilities opened before me.
I could make it appear as several characters were in the same shot,
meaning that I could do dialogue scenes between NPCs,
or place a high number of characters in the same shot.
I used this technique quite ubiquitously from then on.
Third there would be the camera movement, achieved via the camera offsets on one of the first tables I used.
I discovered that I could make the player character invisible thanks to a glitch.
There was a problem, because I couldn't have cam movement and have the player character
appear on screen at the same time, but I still managed to get a lot of shots this way,
that ended up in the final cut.
My personal favourite shot with cam movement would be Solaire looking at the Anor Londo statues.
For me, it represents how Solaire is not Gwyn's firstborn.
The camera moves form the first position, which shows Solaire fitting in the empty pedestal.
Then the camera moves and shows him completely alone, disappointed after not having found his sun in the city.
My other favourite shot is the Sunlight Maggot attacking Solaire.
What I like here is the lack of camera movement,
letting the events take place off screen and in the minds of the viewers.
With Dark Souls II I had the chance to play with the depth of field values, for the first (and last) time.
Cam movement was achievable, by using the camera offsets,
by placing the character out of the screen or using the binoculars in-game.
Black bars or matte made vertical cam movement possible,
even if I lost a portion of the information on screen.
Nowadays I tend to avoid the black bars unless I can't make it without them.
But at the time I deemed it to be the only solution to the lack of free camera movement issue.
My favourite shots are the tracking shot of Vendrick at the end of Chapter III
and the dying out of memories from the last chapter.
For the second shot I made a version of his clothes without the green lights and simply
did a dissolve from one image to another.
There's not much I'd pick from the Dark Souls III movie,
because of all the issues I had with the game.
But even though I consider this project a failure of sorts, there are a few shots that
come to my mind, that I'd like to rescue.
My favourite shot from this project would be the ending to the original Painted World video,
now an ending to the 'Dark Soul of Man' video project.
Since I couldn't recreate the Painter's gesture once the chapel is lit,
I overlapped two shots while zooming out.
I'm very fond of the end result, and it feels like a proper end to both DLCs for this game.
I liked the Painter character the best, and the image of Filianore and her shell,
because of the similarities with 'Angel's Egg', which happens to be my favourite film ever.
In the case of Demon's Souls, I'm actually very proud of the movie, because I learned a lot
from trying to circumvent the issues like the telescope animation or the crosshair for the bows.
I was presented with two big hurdles and I was able to overcome them through editing.
In that sense it taught me a lot.
Though I'm sad to say that I lost all the original videos and now I can only use the
final cut of the movie for projects like this.
Like in the Dark Souls II movie and the first two Team Ico videos,
I had to use black bars to conceal the telescope animation.
You can see the process more in detail in the making of video I made for the Demon's Souls project.
My favourite shots would be many from the fifth chapter, "Astraea and the Valley of Defilement".
The architecture in the level made it very hard to get clear shots, but through careful
placement of the player character's feet I overcame the problems with this game.
It's also my favourite boss fight in the movie.
My personal favourite pick is the shot of the baby in the plague swamp.
I can't remember how I did it, but I actually found a way to make them move from place to place.
In Bloodborne there are two ways to get shots.
The first is to use the monocular and then use the sitting gesture.
The second is to place the player character up against a wall and use the sitting down gesture.
My favourite shots are the ones featuring Kos...
... the cosmos...
... and the doll quietly standing and saying her prayer, and then shedding a tear in remembrance of the hunter.
For Ico I had very little post editing work to do,
beside the actual editing of the shots one after the other.
I had to use matte to have the cutscenes and the gameplay in the same aspect ratio.
I had some issues with the audio,
but overall I'm happy with both the 'Castle in the Mist' video and the movie project.
My favourite one is Yorda staring into the deep sea,
or the shot were you see Yorda standing still while Ico is climbing the windmill.
I had a different part of the video overlapped to make it seem like the dove is passing at that precise moment.
The Shadow of the Colossus movie was a project I had been dreaming of for a long time.
I used black bars again to match the cutscenes.
Unfortunately I had very little control in the fights.
You can't turn the music off,
so editing the original videos together is complicated without changing the audio.
I also had many problems hiding the HUD.
This was the first project where I had to use zoom in massively to get rid of HUD elements.
My favourite shots are a few where the camera movement or placement just seems right.
I also used composite shots in a couple of images, like Wander praying to the corpse of a colossus.
Or Wander petting Agro in the autumn forest.
In The Last Guardian I had to use quick cuts to get a reasonable movie lenght.
The original cut was over three and a half hours long.
I used quick, clear cuts inspired by one of my favourite films, The Tree of Life,
where the images are presented in an ephemeral dream or memory-like fashion.
The shots were achieved through careful camera placement while the boy is crouching,
or zooming in to get rid of tutorials or subtitles as needed.
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