Motorstorm: Duel Drive

It’s Motorstorm in a whole new way!  Two drivers, in a real vehicle, in one of the game’s Pacific Rift tracks.  Of course, Stranger Things Studios would like to thank Sony Entertainment, Motorstorm, and YouTube in advance for letting us use their gameplay footage in the video.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

I wanted to play around with using a green screen.  Green screen, more than anything else, opens up so many possibilities in filming.  You can add things in that don’t exist, create backdrops to fantastical worlds, transport stories into space, create starship battles, you name it!

The simplest idea I could come up with was to pretend to drive a car.  The general concept works like this:

     Step 1: Record some footage of a race car video game (from the driver’s angle).

     Step 2: Have two people sit in front of a green screen and pretend to drive.

     Step 3: Replace the green screen with the game play footage.

And Wha-la!  You have a movie.  Piece of cake!

Ha ha ha ha… nope.

Filming was a blast.  One Friday night Charlie and I played some Motorstorm: Pacific Rift and recorded all our game play.  Oh, the agony ;-)

Saturday afternoon we backed my blazer into the garage, and threw a green screen over the windshield.  I had uploaded all the game play footage onto my phone.  If you watch very closely, you might be able to catch a glimpse of the phone in one of the shots. 

Hit play on the phone, and ACTION!  We pretend to drive the car, and react to the video accordingly.  I synced the set and game videos together at a later date.

The set: a garage, a car, and a camera in the far back.

Funny story:  My wife had to work that night, so while we were setting up to film she was sleeping.  However, to get enough light in the garage to simulate natural sunlight, we pulled all of the lamps out of my house and positioned them all around the car.  When Tonya woke up after dark to get ready for work, she had a hell of a time getting around the house. 

As for post-production, it sucked.

I went about everything wrong right from the get-go.  We should have written a clear script ahead of time, and then focused our game-play on a limited amount of racetracks, not all of them. 

There was tons of footage, with next to no story plot points whatsoever.  Somehow, I had to chop up four hours of footage into a four-minute story; then find game play footage to match.  It was like making two movies simultaneously, and then having them compliment each other.

Two weeks of less than four hours of sleep a night later, along with missing my first deadline by a week, and I finally finished. 

Gotta say though, it turned out amazingly well!