So, I've been doing this WWtLF? prequel for a while now, and I decided to use close ups very often. Despite my modest drawing skills/especially characters/, I think that it would be better, for closeups give better detail andadd more variety. I will also add much animation and emotions to them /on the main character, mainly/, so that this time it's not only three frames of talking heads. Your opinions on that topic?
I think we've seen good closeups quite often, but my favourite ones are from "Shadow of the comet". They were immensely animated and the characters were really well drawn.
well, in MI, they only had facial/expression changes, not even their lips. I still liked that, and missed it in the second game. I'm also planning on using close ups every now and then in my games.
It was done in Quest For Glory 4, as I recall. And in Loom. Their mouths didn't animate, though.
Im pretty sure that the mouths in Hero's Quest IV were animated.
Close-ups are great, IMO. Broken Sword III seemed to use quite a lot of close-ups throughout gameplay and within cut-scenes. FoY is going to feature close-ups during action sequences and cut-scenes as I think they're a great way of conveying action and are often very rewarding.
I loved QfG' IV's use of closeups.. If you can pull that off, maybe you can redeem yourself.
I'm a sucker for closeups. My all time favorites are, 1) the talking views in "Armageddon Margaret", which don't animate BUT change expression, 2) the ones in "Harvester" (same deal), and 3) "Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb", which... er, same deal, come to think of it. BUT the speech-style was LucasArts, you know? The thing was, there was this close up of the fox (or whoever was talking from the party) on the lower left corner, and a closeup of the other "person" on the lower right side, and THOSE closeups changed expression as needed.
...use this info as ye will, ye wise one...
Quote from: Dave Gilbert on Wed 21/04/2004 19:02:22
It was done in Quest For Glory 4, as I recall. And in Loom. Their mouths didn't animate, though.
The mouths did animate in the PC 256 colour CDROM version of LOOM (tm), the problem with that version, though, was that 90% of such close-ups were removed due to their laziness.
Quote from: Vel on Wed 21/04/2004 18:55:00
So, I've been doing this WWtLF? prequel for a while now, and I decided to use close ups very often. Despite my modest drawing skills/especially characters/, I think that it would be better, for closeups give better detail andadd more variety. I will also add much animation and emotions to them /on the main character, mainly/, so that this time it's not only three frames of talking heads. Your opinions on that topic?
I think we've seen good closeups quite often, but my favourite ones are from "Shadow of the comet". They were immensely animated and the characters were really well drawn.
In film school, the lack of close-ups is called "master shot theater," referring to in tradional movie shooting, you film an entire scene from beginning to end in a master shot, a not too far off not to close camera setup, then you go back and shoot close ups and far away shots, and drop those into the master shot. Anything you forgot to shoot as a close up or a specialty shot, at least you have the master shot in the editing room. Well, people are terrified of getting in close with their cameras as students, so student films end up being all two shots of people from their knees to some headspace above the actors.
What any of that has to do with adventure games is, a lot of times when your cut-scenes are strictly in-engine, you end up with the same thing. I mean, not to knock in-engine cut-scenes, almost all the LucasArts games (and almost every single AGS game I've ever played) uses them, I mean, they're easy, just put some text above the head of the characters. But if you did use close-ups, even with moderate art ability I think it would really broaden your ability to present a dramatic story.
So, long post short, um, good idea.
I love closeups in film! I plan to use them AMAP.