time compression problem in machinima (VRFiction)
Saturday, 18 June 2005 06:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eOne of the more powerful tools available to the cinematographer is time compression. A sequence of very short clips of a person picking up their car keys, exiting their house, getting into the car, maybe a few brief clips of them driving through various settings, then pulling into the destination, ending with them pressing a doorbell, can take maybe 10 seconds to depict a half hour journey. Doing something similar is much more difficult for the maker of a story to be played out inside a virtual tool in what has become known as machinima. (Actually, most machinima is, absurdly, ordinary 2D movies captured inside 3D worlds, and ignores the immense possibilities of stories constructed and viewed in 3D worlds. [here] and [here])
To understand why time compression can be a problem inside VRFiction, imagine a mystery story in which you are watching the story unfold. It is just before dusk, and the main character is doing something relatively uninteresting so you decide to explore the other rooms in the scene, but while you are away from the main character they receive a phone call and leave to drive to a friend's house half an hour's journey away. By the time they get there dark will have fallen. You don't realise the main character has left.
Here is the problem: if the author of the story attempts time compression on the main character to distill the half hour drive into ten seconds, what happens to your viewpoint, left back at the house? It could be disastrous for your viewpoint to suddenly have large time gaps for no obvious reason -- suddenly it gets dark. If you decide to compress time for audience members who follow the main character, but not for those who are elsewhere in the virtual world, what happens when one of those audience members, who might have followed the main characters tells you that something interesting is happening over at the other house -- that it is after dark (it isn't dark where you are) and that an accident has happened outside your window (no accident has happened outside your window yet).
Do you see? Because of time compression your fellow audience member is a half hour in the future of this world's time. This can cause all kinds of problems, particularly if you let viewers teleport instantly between different parts of the 3d world.
To understand why time compression can be a problem inside VRFiction, imagine a mystery story in which you are watching the story unfold. It is just before dusk, and the main character is doing something relatively uninteresting so you decide to explore the other rooms in the scene, but while you are away from the main character they receive a phone call and leave to drive to a friend's house half an hour's journey away. By the time they get there dark will have fallen. You don't realise the main character has left.
Here is the problem: if the author of the story attempts time compression on the main character to distill the half hour drive into ten seconds, what happens to your viewpoint, left back at the house? It could be disastrous for your viewpoint to suddenly have large time gaps for no obvious reason -- suddenly it gets dark. If you decide to compress time for audience members who follow the main character, but not for those who are elsewhere in the virtual world, what happens when one of those audience members, who might have followed the main characters tells you that something interesting is happening over at the other house -- that it is after dark (it isn't dark where you are) and that an accident has happened outside your window (no accident has happened outside your window yet).
Do you see? Because of time compression your fellow audience member is a half hour in the future of this world's time. This can cause all kinds of problems, particularly if you let viewers teleport instantly between different parts of the 3d world.