Computer Graphics World

January 2009 34 captured the footage on his computer using Fraps. Later, the team integrated the in-game imagery into the film, which was edited in Adobe's Premiere Pro. "My motion graph- ics animator used After Effects, so he would send me the source files, and we would swap project files back and forth to do any quick changes," says Escoriaza. "Immediately the new file would pop into my Premiere time- line, and I could just press play to review it." Real Challenges According to Escoriaza, the biggest techni- cal challenge the group faced was bring- ing the avatars to life in a way that viewers could relate to them. "e difficulty was capturing in-game shots the way we want- ed them," he says. "It's not easy to do cam- era movement whereby you are completely in sync with the other avatars. I fell off cliffs quite a bit, and many times a monster would kill me during filming. Sometimes I couldn't reach the perfect spot for a shot because the avatar just couldn't get there— it's not always logistically possible." Initially, the team tried to capture all the in-game footage through Fraps. As the work progressed, the filmmakers found themselves using more and more of the bluescreening technique, capturing still images inside the virtual spaces. To link the real and virtual scenes more tightly, Escoriaza used a shaky-camera style while filming in each. While After Effects offers a number of presets to achieve this look, the crew instead meshed together six to 10 different effects, some of which were generated from scratch. Despite the dramatic increase in people who play video games, whether single play- er, multiplayer, or massively multiplayer, there have been few attempts to combine actual game footage with live action to any extent. Yet, the action taken by Pure West to do just that may become commonplace in the near future. "ese avatars are be- coming so personalized and are ingrained deep into people's psyche, and they are an important part of them—just as important as their real lives," says Escoriaza. Who knows, shortly we may see a trend toward home movies that not only include real-life friends, relatives, and pets, but vir- tual ones as well. n Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor for Computer Graphics World. Filming in the real world at times could be nearly as challenging as doing so inside the virtual worlds. CGW_Half_HOR:CGW_Half_HOR 7/15/08 1:28 PM Page 1 n n n n Film

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