I suppose that would work if the series was turned into a LoTR-esque trilogy, which is certainly a possibility. In this case, I was giving each singular movie it’s own plot and progression while also giving in towards the whole.
Though, I think we may be communicating different ideas. In my case, I’m referring to showing various scenes of the HECU trying to find Gordon and do their mission, without any real depth, while I believe you see it as more of a side-plot. I don’t see any reason why seeing the HECU soldiers fight from their point of view shouldn’t be in the movie, though toning down on Shepard is probably for the best. One of the nice things about Half Life is that the story itself can easily be summed up without visiting every map of the game. Office complex could last under two minutes, for example, as there’s little more than scare tactics and enemy introduction there. Oh, and puzzles, but nobody wants to watch the protagonists stack crates.
When you mentioned having a specifically named HECU member to be followed, and telling a portion of the story from their point of view in my mind equated to you proposing a side-plot involving a character in the HECU, I am sorry if that wasn’t what you were trying to convey. If you are however proposing scenes of the HECU making their way through black mesa, then that isn’t to far from what I had in mind. Truth be told everyone has a director’s vision of how it could be accomplished, and yours wasn’t as far away from the Half-Life plot as some of the suggestions I have seen on here both before and after the crash. We share many of the same view points as to how a HL movie could work. Maybe tomorrow I’ll sit down and retype the example plot that I wrote before the crash and let you have a chance to critique it
Sounds good to me. Perhaps something could be done amongst the community to send along to Valve. While nothing can be done without the funding of a major film corporation besides a hack-job amateur film unfit for something of this scale, having a script or even just a base to work from could be useful. Granted, I don’t doubt they already have something of the sort, considering that the series was written by an actual writer.
I wrote Newell about it. In an interview he told about how hollywood did a bad job writing a screen play, that he hired writers to write a screen play and they did a bad job. I said that there is real talent out there in the fan world, and the fans could probably do a good job if it was opened up for a community project or something. He wrote back and told me that
So he is having his staffers work on turning a game into a movie. there is a distinct possiblity that since VALVe has been working with animation, the movie may be animated as opposed to live action.
I don’t know how well Half Life would translate to an animated movie, as weird as it sounds. Now, I’m actually an animator myself. I love animation to an insane degree, due to this. However, the one thing Half Life has always seemed to strive for is realism. The promotions for the original game stressed the game’s realistic AI, and HL2 and the episodes are only graphically inferior to photorealism because of hardware limitations.
Now, you may suggest that the L4D introduction movie looked great, and it did. It was gorgeous, thematic, and written very well. As were -all- of the Tf2 shorts, especially Meet the Spy. However, it’s still very apparent that they are animated, and that would detract from the experience. Falf Life is just made for live action, IMO.
Not to entirely derail the thread or anything, though.
Perhaps they could make a HalfLife movie using a tweaked version of the game engine then? How better to make the characters look like how we remember them? (c:
You just got that from an interview, or else he just copied and pasted what he said in an interview into your email reply. Either way, I don’t think you should interpret his reply as meaning that they have any plans for a HL2 film in the future, or that it would be animated. What he means by the animation shorts is that they’ve had a chance to experiment with directing - which means camera angles, lighting, timing, editing, cinematography, voice acting and numerous other things that they never had the chance to use before. All of these things translate directly to filming.
That would look awful and go a long way towards make the film look as though it was directly marketed towards video gamers. I’ve always been adament that if a HL/2 film is to work and gain credibility, it would need to appeal to a wider audience and take advantage of the incredible designs and storytelling within the game. It’s got the potential, so why not?
@ Sitten: I vaguely remember your plot but not in full detail, so do post it again. In my spare time I’ve slowly been writing a novel to a HL2 film, one that doesn’t have Freeman as the main character. In fact, he doesn’t exist in there at all. I’ve got to nearly 30,000 words in, so I might post it and see what people think.
The Left 4 Dead intro and the Meet the Team videos were made using a tweaked version of the game engine, which Valve is supposed to release to the public after all the Team Members of TF2 have there own video.
^ And that’s meant to dissuade me from thinking that they’d look awful as the basis of a film? Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Meet the Team videos and the L4D intro, but if you release a film based on a game with the game’s graphics as the basis for the film - it will only really appeal to fans of the game and possibly a younger audience. What Valve wants and has been looking for is some way of translating the film to a wider audience. If their film is only going to be seen by fans of the game, they’re not going to make any profit.
Well you do have a point there. The thing is, if they do make a movie about it, then it will be of a much higher quality than the L4D and TF2 videos, it wont be some little 3 minute video meant to be watched on some guys computer. It’s gonna be a fucking movie, they’re gonna make the best looking models there is. It would be almost hard to tell if they were actors or not. Then again, maybe the Source Engine can’t handle stuff like that yet. But still, look at Crysis, that game is photo realistic, why can’t a movie be the same?
Because we’re a hell of a long way from graphics being 100% realistic. You can always tell that a game is a game. Even computer animated films such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Beowulf, which use graphics far beyond those of Crysis, weren’t 100% realistic. It gets to the point where the amount of work involved to create a CGI film is so great that you might as well go ahead and make the film normally. You’d only be looking to make the headcrabs and creatures from CGI. The rest of the film would benefit substantially from a real life setting with real characters.
I don’t understand some CGI films. Certainly you can use them as an alternate to cartoons when your main characters and cast aren’t human, but when you’re just recreating humans in CGI it is nothing but a technological boast, but that doesn’t answer whether a film is good or not.
The trouble with photo-realistic humans in CG films is the zombie effect - the closer to real they look, the less your brain fills in the gaps (which is why when Shrek and FinalFantasy came out, to most people, Shrek felt more real/alive) - when they look real your brain stops compensating for the lack of facial subtleties and since they are not all animated things look a bit dead. But the amount of work to animate every tiny facial-muscle movement is too much work. Even the extra-fancy performance-capture used for Benjamin Button had what they called a botox-effect where it would loose the finest details.
However I still think using a modified game engine would be a great idea for non-human stuff or backgrounds as they generally render near realtime, where most non-GPU rendering pipelines definitely do not. I know, I was a CG Technical Director for a while, and the renderfarm was always busy.
The CGI films by Robert Zemekis (Beowulf, Polar Express and the soon-to-be-released A Christmas Carol) may have been as close to ‘photo realism’ as has been seen, they still had absolutely NO life in them whatsoever. On the other hand, the CGI films by Pixar are some of the most surprisingly ‘real’ films I’ve ever had the pleasure to watch, despite most of their characters being inanimate objects or unusual creatures.
The difference is, of course, the actual animation itself, rather than the look. Whereas Zemekis tried to capture human movement in CGI, Pixar tried (romantically, I think) to reflect the human spirit in their animation. It’s hard to explain, but there’s something distinctly recognisable in their films, so much so that (I, at least) forget it’s a ‘childrens’ animation.
This would work for TF2, almost certainly. But Half Life and any other Valve IP would have to be live-action.
Nah, I’m not into that at all. I appreciate films much more for their physical, tangible sets and try to avoid films that disperse with that in favour of a CGI ‘set’. There are two, very popular films that go some way to explaining this. After watching the Appendices of the LOTR Trilogy I found myself lost in the myriad of the little details that were painstakingly hand-made over years of work. On the other hand, I remember seeing a pre-release photograph of Revenge of the Sith in Total Film Magazine. Ewan McGregor and Hayden “Mr. Wooden 2005” Christensen on a set of green. I was a little… let down.
There is that, but then again, these days (budget permitting) it’s a set of grey (unless you are standing beind the camera in which case you can see the reflected blue/green/whatever since that nifty stuff reflects it back at the source only. No more green reflections everywhere to get rid of in post (c:
The ‘green’ in my post was purely incidental. It could be grey, blue or magenta. My point is that I prefer a set (fantasy, science-fiction, period drama, present-day thriller… any genre) that has been made by hands, rather than software.
I really emailed the man,and he really answered me I’m not making that up:pffft: . Newell didn’t copy and paste directly from an interview, because there were little snippits that I left out that weren’t relevant, but anyway, I am not saying that he confirmed or even hinted that it would a be an animated movie, I just noted the fact that they have been using animation and that there maybe a possibility that Valve may try to make an animated movie.
If you think about it, animation comes with some distinct advantages. They don’t have to go out and hire a big name director who may decide that a gameplot is beneath him and do a hack job, or fail to bring the movie to life to fans because he doesn’t get it himself. They don’t have to worry about hiring a bunch of actors which may do a crappy job at acting. I think that it would be good for a TF2 movie it they decide to make one, but I am not sold myself about how a Half-Life movie would fair animated. I mean the primary audience that goes to see animated movies go there not taking it serious and they like the movie because it isn’t serious. However Half-Life is which means that audience that it may attract won’t like it and limit it to a gamer only movie. It may just have to be a live-action. :S
I am sorry I haven’t gotten around to rewrite my example plot summary. I have been somewhat busy lately. In roughly 10days I leave for college so there are a lot of last minute details I have to take care of.
I have to go ahead and disagree with you on a lot of this. Now, it may just be because I’m an animator at heart, but the advantages you listed for animation weren’t really all that advantageous. animation, like live action, requires a full understanding of camera angles and the like, and a director isn’t just there for the camera work. The director makes sure the pacing of the scenes is correct, and that the emotion intended for each part is appropriate; among other things, of course.
You would have to worry about the actors, perhaps even moreso than in a live action movie. Many people believe that just anyone can go into a studio and do voice acting for a cartoon because all they have to do is talk, but the reality is completely opposite that. Voice actors, good ones at least, are hard to find. Valve has some real talent at their studios, which is why all their games/videos are as good as they are. Ever look at the credits for Valve titles? Sure, HL2 has some big names, but look at Barney. The same guy voices him, the G-Man (IIRC), as well as the original Barney guards from HL.
Finally, the target audience of animated movies may not always be mature, intellectual adults, and that really is due to the stereotype given to the medium by the general populace. People who truly appreciate animation tend to enjoy it as an art form. (Good or bad thing, I suppose) Many recent films done with CGI have been targeted not at children, but at such people. I don’t think people taking the movie seriously has anything to do with whether it is animated or not, only that using CGI would be untrue to the artistic style of the games; IE emulation of reality.
So now that I’ve ranted uselessly and fervently, I shall end this section with a good luck on your college endeavors.
Now, onto the newest topic at hand, the use of CGI vs hand-built sets. I personally feel that Black Mesa would be easier to do using real sets, as the facility is technically modern-day, and it would be easier and more true-to-life to make the sets reflect that by using actual materials. Game-rendered worlds are meant for the likes of fantastical environments, as far as I’ve seen. However, it may be an idea for Xen, which is about as surreal as one can get.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
