Friday, July 26, 2013

Watch 'The Last Of Us' As A Movie

After turning the new 'Tomb Raider' and 'The Uncharted Trilogy' into full length game movies, Andy Gilleand is back with a new one; 'The Last Of Us'.
If you don't know what this is, no, it's not a "Let's Play" or a walkthrough of any kind. If that were the case, it would be several hours longer. What I did here was try to take the entire story of the game, and edit it down to fit in a movie. I would include gameplay, but only the gameplay I felt was necessary to tell the story. If I could cut sections out without causing plot holes or ruining pacing, I would cut as much as I could. I also played the game several times before doing this to gain a familiarity with the levels, to help me with "directing" the game into a movie as best as I could. This meant doing things you typically wouldn't do while playing the game, such as skipping nearly every one of the items left around, such as ammo or other supplies helpful to survival. I played on Normal mode to minimize the extra difficulty this would cause.

There are a few things that differ this movie from my others. While the game uses the same engine as the Uncharted games, it's been modified. Whenever Uncharted had a button prompt for items or opening doors or whatever, it would usually be towards the edges of the screen, and so it was usually easy enough to edit out. However, Last of Us places button prompts directly on the objects they correspond to, making them very difficult to edit out without it looking bad. So where I could, I edited out the button prompts, but many had to be left as they were. Thankfully there were some options I could disable, such as Melee Prompts and Hints, although some of those still showed up from time to time as well.

Normally, in a game like Uncharted or Tomb Raider, I would be able to skip over a majority of the traversal. However, in this game, so much dialogue is exchanged during these parts, that I felt was critical to the story, that it became very difficult to edit the gameplay down. I ended up leaving in substantial amount of gameplay compared to some of my other movies. Though by skipping collecting items or exploring optional areas, and simply going straight through the levels, I feel I helped speed things along as to not cause the gameplay segments to draw on too long.
 
Sorry about how long I waited to release this. I'm a big supporter of Naughty Dog. In fact, I support every developer I make game movies from. I believe these games are well worth the full price they are charging, and as such, I don't want to potentially cause anybody to skip out on buying the game simply because they could watch my movie.
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