Project 3 Sketch 3 – Cross fading between 2 different times.

Here I tried to see how I could manipulate time within a game. I found that it’s much more harder to work around time within the gaming genre because it’s a bit harder to get footage that really brings out this idea of ‘time’. Essentially in most games it’s structured to give you only 1 set of time, i.e. playing a match in Counter Strike in a map that’s always set during the day. For me, the only real way to manipulate and emphasize time in a video game is through progress. So for example, in an RPG (Role Playing Game), it’s structured in a way that provides you ‘levels’ as you progress, making you stronger the more you play. I reckon time could easily be manipulated in a video when using content such as that where you simply shot various clips start at say level 1 and progressing until level 50 or something.

Now for this sketch however, I was luckily enough to stumble across a game that uses time within its structure (Grand Theft Auto). This made it easy for me to simply do a cross fade between two moments, one when I’m driving in the day and one when I’m driving at night – a simple visualization of time.

Although it works, I don’t think this kind of concept within the gaming genre works as well as something like a montage using found footage. Plus, it’s heavily restricting because as said earlier, progress is probably the only real effective way of working with this concept and we simply don’t have the time to spend recording every little moment of progress.

So we’ve decided to abandon this notion of ‘time’ within the video game genre as it works better with live action recordings.

Note: Throughout these newer sketches I’ve decided to stop using Fraps to record in-game and I’ve switched to a program called ‘Shadowplay’ which is a free program provided by the Nvidia GPU group. This is because Fraps places a massive strain on computer processes which could effect how well it’s recorded and the file sizes can as large as 50gb for 2 minutes depending on the quality. Shadowplay however, places less strain on the processes and still records at high definition as well as compresses the video files so they’re much smaller than Fraps videos.

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