Lighting the scene happens simultaneously to the sound creation, since they are not dependent on each other. In any art content creation, you see a jump in perceived quality when replacing temp assets with finalized assets. However, lighting is the best bang for your buck as far as added quality into the scene. Once this goes in, the production value goes up drastically, for a (relatively) small amount of time spent lighting it. We had an amazing light editor, written in Python by Nathaniel Albright, that updated the game in real time. We could position our lights, adjust the attenuation, falloff, whether or not they casted shadows, and what they lit (characters / levels or both). For comparison, in SR1 we lighted in Max, which didn’t show the effect of the lights properly since the shaders don’t show up correctly in that program. We would then have to export out the lights and reload the cutscene, for each change we made. The new tool we had on SR2 made for quicker iteration, and thus increased the quality of the lighting exponentially. We used this tool to light per character, per shot, per time of day.
No lights? No depth.
The in game lighting helps bring depth to their forms
So- after lighting is done, audio is dropped in, we’re all set and we can ship the game, right?
Wrong.
The last remaining months in the game are an exercise in keeping spinning plates, spinning. Even though many of the cutscenes were playing in game correctly- any one of them can break at any point in production, up until the build is locked down, and sometimes after. So, we become testers at this point (in addition to Volition’s QA staff)- watching every cutscene over and over.
Since Saints Row 2 is all about customization, we try as best as we can to watch all of them in nearly every combination you can watch them in. One scene can play correctly with the PC as an obese Asian man with a blue mohawk, chaps, British accent, playing during the nighttime in the rain. However, the same scene can have a bug with the PC as a skinny black woman with dreadlocks, tank top, platform shoes and a Hispanic accent on a cloudless sunny day. Countless variations lead to countless bugs.
Sometimes you play the scene one day it’s fine. The next day, with the latest build of the game, all of the Ronin soldiers’ torsos are turned around 180 degrees like something out of a horror movie, and Johnny Gat has turned into an animated couch. No joke.
But such is the way of game development- it’s not done until it’s shipped, and even then you have to live with some that made it through. Deadlines have to be met. In the end, we do our best to keep all 90 minutes of the cutscenes functioning, and looking like they’re supposed to. The process of finding and fixing bugs happens all the way up until lockdown- and sometimes after.
The timeline at the bottom has a line for every edit in this scene, made linearly in Max
Before the actual finished product, here are some tidbits about the scene:
- Total number of shots in the scene: 128 (in comparison, one scene in SR2 was a long take. It only had 1 shot).
- Shortest camera shot: 7 frames
- The flowers that Johnny Gat give Aisha in the last cutscene of Saints Row 1 are the same ones that are on the table for this scene. Flowers came to symbolize Aisha as a visual motif. Even when she is killed- the flowers have the same fate. Also, in Shogo’s burial scene, flowers are again displayed in the foreground.
- The slo-mo to fast-mo zoom in when Gat is stabbed is a small homage to the camerawork in the last shot of 300.
- The action film Bad Boys 2 was a major influence to the camera movement & quick editing style seen in many of Saints Row 2’s cutscenes. It was also reference for bullet and debris effects for the House Party scene, particularly when the wall is being peppered with the PC’s submachine gun, causing tons of debris to fly outward at the camera.
- Exporting animation for House Party would create 2624 animations- an uncompressed animation, a compressed ps3 and xbox 360 version, for every character in every shot of this scene. Any animatable objects are “characters” as well, such as our pistols and the flowers.
And now, the finished cinematic. Enjoy.
Feel free to email me at snoutmus@hotmail.com with questions or comments.