THE PROCESS BEHIND PUTTING FIREWATCH ON STAGE AT E3
It’s a strange experience to see your game on stage at an E3 keynote, but the process of getting it up there is maybe stranger. Not because of the nervousness or potential thrill or anything like that, but because of the sheer number of pieces involved to create a fully functioning piece of E3 Keynote Stage Event.
As you might guess from our Firewatch GDC event, we are the sort of people who get excited about slightly overwrought theatrical experiences, so when Sony told us not only would we be in their E3 keynote, but that we had the option of putting together content for every screen and every light in the theater, we jumped at the chance. Firewatch was given only about a minute of time in Sony’s keynote and we wanted to make the most of it, so we pitched Sony a storyboard that we hoped made for a thrilling trailer but also used every piece of the stage equipment we could find a use for.
Above: A storyboard pitch sent to Sony for how the screens would be used.
The trailer itself was coming along great—we engaged the services of our friend Derek Lieu as editor and general wrangler, and he worked with Sean and James to get an edit together. Olly and Jane worked on cleaning up the lighting and polishing some parts of the world we wanted in the trailer but weren’t yet fully built out.
Above: Olly’s color script for the trailer and Jane’s in-progress execution of the color script and atmospherics in engine, from mid-way through work.
Sony got back to us saying they liked the theater pitch, which meant we had to build it. Which brings us to…
THE TALE OF INFINITE SCREENS
Sony’s setup, as you can tell, is ridiculous. The Sony E3 keynote stage has five giant screens of different sizes, all working in concert with the auditorium’s entire lighting rig to make sure you freak the hell out about whatever they’re showing. The main video sits in that center screen, and is 1080p. Pretty standard aside from the fact that it’s the size of my parents’ house. That main screen is flanked by an more-than-9000-pixels-wide strip of display they call “The Ribbon,” which seems to dwarf my parents’ entire block. They also have three smaller triple-length-wide screens at the base of the stage, to give people in the closer seats something they can look at that won’t melt their faces like an Indiana Jones special effect.
The Ribbon is outrageously wide. If a Best Buy sales rep was trying to sell you a Ribbon, they’d tell you it was a 98:9 TV. We wanted that final shot to go panoramic and envelop the stage. To preserve a smooth antialiased image we had to capture at twice the resolution of the screen, which meant we had to capture 98:9 video at almost 18k resolution. Paolo wrote a quick extension to Unity’s screenshot tool so we could grab stills to test.
Above: This is not a screenshot of Firewatch’s pro gaming noscope mode. It’s just an early Ribbon test before we sorted out a good FOV.
Above: The final Ribbon shot. Click here to download a still of our ribbon footage at fully ridiculous 18k resolution. Anyone with a 98:9 monitor at home now has the first ever wallpaper that actually fills their whole screen.
The still capture was great and let us compose the shot how we wanted for testing, but for the trailer we needed to consistently capture the end shot at 98:9, at full frame rate, in a way that’s guaranteed to work across multiple edit passes. How is that possible? Enter the Unity Asset Store, and specifically uRecord. uRecord let us do the same mega res capture as Paolo’s quick screenshot tool, but also managed the engine’s time scale to fix it to a fixed framerate and dump out the images for us at the push of a button.
Above: The E3 presentation laid out on the different screens all playing together in the master After Effects file.
Sony’s template files for this crazy rig were fantastic. I was able to lay out the different screens and then watch as their Adobe After Effects file compiled it all together into the video you see above. (Firewatch just had a trailer in today’s keynote – my hat is off to all the teams who prepped complete running demos to play in this environment!)
It took the whole team, some great support from Sony’s E3 team, and a surprising amount of in-engine rendering time—and we’re very happy with the results. Hopefully you enjoyed it in today’s keynote!
Above: a snap from the end of the trailer presentation taken by @BlazeKickTweet. Thanks!
Missed the trailer? You can see it in its final form on Campo’s YouTube channel.
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