Camera tricks

The very first shot in the internet series Red Vs. Blue is a sweeping crane shot that scales up the side of one of the buildings, from the ground to the roof. Using the first person camera, it isn’t possible to achieve that shot by simply causing the character to look towards the sky. The camera needed to be level with the characters that were standing on the roof, and thus, the producers needed to find a way to physically lift the camera. To solve this problem, they stood the cameraman on the very end of the gun turret positioned on the tank. By using a second character (named ‘Driver’) they slowly raised the turret, which caused the cameraman to rise to the level of the roof. This process had to be done slowly and carefully however. If the tank moved too quickly, the game would interpret the movement as an enemy attack, and act as the cameraman had been run over by the tank, thus killing him.

In many of the locations on the maps that the producers can use, there are no areas where a character can stand and be able to film an overhead view. The areas that are high enough to use are usually too far away from where the action needs to take place.

When the creators of Red Vs. Blue where faced with this challenge, they decided to utilize an aspect of the Halo multiplayer system. When a player is killed, there is an automatic wait time, or respawn time, before the character can return to the game. During this time, the camera view that appears on the character’s screen is a sweeping view of all the other players in battle. This view is usually an overhead shot. The producers used this shot to film a character driving up a base by simply removing the on-screen stats that appear while a character respawns and brightening the screen so the viewer does not know that the cameraman has died.




An overhead shot acheived using the respawn camera.

More times than not, camera issues can be faced in the same way that traditional film issues are dealt with. If a shot needs to contain several characters that need to appear to be standing in the same location when they are in reality a distance away from each other on the map, the film can simply be edited together in post production.



Although the characters in this scene appear to be talking to a character that is only a few feet away (not pictured), they are actually across the map from each other.




A scene only available in the single player campagian mode, this shot has been edited into the video during post production.