The first rule of being an extra on a film shoot is to never look directly into the camera. There was little danger as long as everybody’s movements were choreographed in time with the camera’s, but if you’re the paranoid sort or just have a weird mistrust of machines you’d maybe think twice before sharing a stage with this camera.Īnother problem arose with the extras used in the audience. Fortunately there were no injuries on set. If a musician or crew member was out of position they easily could’ve been run over or walloped by the rig. It can also twirl around at 180 degrees in a snap. It can slide across that track at great speeds, and despite weighing in at over a ton it is remarkably fast and nimble. The danger came with the speed, power and torque of the Bolt. He’d walk around the stage while the cobbled-together band pantomimed a performance, and his motions would then be flawlessly replicated by the Bolt as many times as needed. They used a live camera operator to create the data that would guide the Bolt.
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For the Bolt to run they had to install 30 meters of track on the stage, and had to cut a groove so it’d be the right height for a human viewpoint.įreeStyle couldn’t completely discard the human touch, though. FreeStyle looked to motion control cameras to solve this problem, eventually settling on a device called the Bolt, “an amazing rig that’s actually adapted from the car manufacturing industry,” Davey said. So shooting the video footage couldn’t be as simple as strapping a camera to somebody and having them prowl around the stage. “In order to achieve that effect we realized you can’t shoot an entire twelve-minute set handheld, and then shoot that exact same path again handheld so that the cuts between the two films don’t jar.” “What we’re going to do is to make live video adjust to your performance and the only way of doing that is to shoot more than one film and then switch between them,” producer Joel Davey said. Nobody could perform the exact motions over multiple takes as precisely as would be needed. Also the nature of the game required two different takes of every performance, one with a positive reaction from the crowd and one negative, and the camera motions had to sync up perfectly for both. They were an active part of a larger performance, and not merely a device used to capture it. Camera operators try to be invisible, but for Guitar Hero Live the operator had to effectively play a member of the band. There were a few factors that made a real-life camera operator less than optimal for FreeStyle’s needs. The plan was to make the game look more human, but one of the biggest problems came from the human element.
No easy task, but it wound up being even more complicated than FreeStyle expected. The goal was to make the film look seamless, like a real person’s undivided field of vision as they romped on stage during a performance, while turning a small set with several dozen extras into concert footage that looked authentic. We’ve never made films until now,” Jamie Jackson, FreeStyle’s creative director, said during a behind-the-scenes look at how they shot this video footage. This was a huge change from how FreeStyle, a studio probably best known for the DJ Hero games, normally works. You’re never on screen, but you’re always at the center, with everybody looking at you and reacting to how well you play along with the song. The people on screen are played by real people: the bands are made of real musicians cast to play prefab groups from various genres, and the audience members are real fans of those genres recruited to make the concert footage look realistic. As you riff along to the Black Keys or Fall Out Boy you’ll share satisfied nods with your band mates and gaze out at a massive crowd singing along to every word.
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When tasked with bringing the once-popular series back from the dead after a five-year absence, FreeStyle decided to ditch the cartoonish graphics of old and go with a full motion video approach that puts the player on stage with the band. You usually don’t need a real camera at all. Normally when you make a game you don’t have to use a potentially lethal robot camera. A week after a visit to the UK headquarters of Guitar Hero Live designers FreeStyle Games, that sticks out more than anything else I learned about the game, or even England.