Working around a game that is already made brings with it various restrictions: for instance I had to adapt my idea to the few ingame environments. I started out trying to find fitting locations but many times I had to change the plot and the storyboard.
At the end I managed to create a story that uses some of the most suggestive Battlefield 4 maps: Zavod 311, Operation Locker, Operation Metro and Operation Mortar. Narrow down the list to these ones was very challenging for a huge Battlefield fan like me.
This cinematic is a homage to the Battlefield series and to every FPS player.
Even if FPS are violent games, they promote so many positive values like friendship and respect, that I will be always proud of being part of the FPS community.
The last two sentences might not sound like related to the narrative of One Life but they are, because with this cinematic I wanted to show a bit of what means being part of a group of friends with a passion for shooters.
Once the narrative was done, we started to record: we used a couple of PCs in order to have more shots and stress less the actors. Even thought this system we had to organize 5 recording sessions, we discovered pretty soon that coordinate a lot of people at the same time is pretty complicated. Especially if they are not in the same room but scattered in Canada, the US and in Europe.
We started to work on the edit once we had the first videos, in order to understand if we got enough good shots, which was’t always the case. This forced us to record again the same scenes, always trying to improve our procedure and our precision.
I am speaking about precision because it is important to note that we had to record everything by hand, that’ why sometimes the camera moves a bit in a weird way. Battlefield provides a very complete cinema mode, but not an assisted recording system: this can be a big problem trying to record slow, smooth panoramas.
I was taking care of the editing of the first section of the cinematic; we tried to work as a team even at 5am, when many times someone had to say “it doesn’t look good, fix it” or “render it again“.