During my VRP project, I wanted to create some short stories to place in my work to help build a body of work. From there I could work down to focus on one area, but its at a start of a project I like to make as much work as I can. I thought if make a blog post to talk through my process of how I create work in video games, and how I plan out the narratives.
I first have to run some primary test on my PC to make sure the photo capture software is working properly, these only take about 5 minutes. I use a software called NVidea shadow play, this allowed me to broadcast, record and take screenshots of all the games I play. I activate this in game I have the keyboard shortcut (ALT+F2)
Depending on what game I am working with, the way of framing the image varies. Below I will talk through each game and the way I frame the image
Grand Theft Auto Five (2013)
A. There are two ways I can take images in GTAV, there is a built in camera phone mode, the photos get shared directly to their social club online for me to download straight to my laptop.
B. The other way is to go into first person mode, change the setting to remove all the hud (radar, health bar, FPS counter) and use the NVidea Shadow Pay feature to capture the environment
Option A is easier with the direct upload. However the resolution isn’t as good. I also can not move my character around the world while in photo mode
Option B is much harder, it slower to take photos so I lose moment more often. However the resolution of the files is much better.
Far Cry Five (2018)
FC5 has a brilliant built in photo mode, it is really easy to use and gives me a lot of control over the time of day, characters expressions and focal length. I actually don’t need to use the NVidea Shadow Play feature at all.
Star Wars BattleFront (2015)
I found with SWBF, it is easier to screen record myself played, then take this into Premier Pro, sequence though the film frame by frame, and save the stills as TIFF’s. This is such a long way to do this as the content goes from game, premiere pro to Lightroom. However SWBF is truly a stunning game, so the quality of content I can produce this way is really stunning.
Forza 4 Horizon
I originally brought FH4 because of the perfected photo mode built in, I can change the time of day, apature, shutter speed so so much more I haven’t explored yet. The only drawback I have seen from this way, it every photo I take in game has a very ugly watermark in the top right corner. So I have to take the image into photoshop to be able to remove this.
