RE5 Cutscene Director's Recipe For Horror

John Funk

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Dec 20, 2005
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RE5 Cutscene Director's Recipe For Horror



Filmmaker Jim Sonzero, who directed over 50 cutscenes in Resident Evil 5, cites 28 Days Later and Metal Gear Solid 4 as some of his inspirations to make the survival horror game as horrifying as possible.

Think of a survival horror game - any survival horror game - and the atmosphere that the genre usually implies. Dark, narrow corridors, mist and gloom and enemies whose presence you hear before you see. Now think about Africa, a continent not known so much for its dark and gloomy towns as it is its bright, hot, and wide-open savannas.

In the absence of the genre's usual tricks, how do you make a game scary? That was the challenge facing Capcom with Resident Evil 5, and so they opted to hire someone with experience - Jim Sonzero, whose work on Wes Craven's Pulse (a remake of Japanese horror film Kairo) impressed the producers. Sonzero had never worked on a videogame before, but once he had the script and began to visualize the sequences, it was "very similar to the movie-making process," he told MTV Multiplayer [http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/03/10/resident-evil-5-cinematic-director-made-scenes-scary-gory/].

Sonzero said that with the exception of Metal Gear Solid 4, he was unimpressed with videogame cutscenes as a whole. "I just found them to be not cinematic. The choice of lenses, the way the narrative beats were exposed in the cinematics, seemed really static and flat." So he aimed to bring his directorial experience to bear on the project. For inspiration, he looked to 28 Days Later as an example for how zombies can be terrifying in broad daylight, and Black Hawk Down as a way to shoot the African villages in which the game takes place.

For Sonzero, these cutscenes were a chance to make a movie as scary and as gory as he'd ever wanted - RE5's cinematics push the carnage limit, he said. "[W]ith the monsters and the evolution of the creatures and how they would burst and rupture out of people's bodies - there was no limitation."

Well, not no limitation - a few scenes were a bit too brutal, and had to be taken down a notch. Another unexpected hurdle for Sonzero was that sometimes, his cinematic ideas had to be curtailed to fit the limits of the coding - occasionally he would be told that the developers hadn't properly modeled a particular area, so he would have to put his camera somewhere else.

Beyond RE5, Sonzero is reportedly in talks with Capcom about directing a live-action movie based on one of the company's franchises. Resident Evil and Street Fighter might not have had much success in that regard, but what the hell - there's always Bionic Commando, right?

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Brotherofwill

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Jan 25, 2009
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Mhhhmmm from what I've heard the game isn't supposed to be scary in the slightest, it isn't even considered a horror game by most anymore. In that regard he failed I guess, but that might just be part of the overall direction the game was going in.

He is right about the MGS4 scenes though, they are miles out of the league of all other games in terms of cinematic storytelling.
 

Blank__

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Oct 9, 2008
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I haven't heard about its scariness, but RE4 frightened me in quite a few places -- not knowing when things might pop out and savage poor Leon. The dogs were terrifying.

28 Days Later is also a terrifying movie. Good lords, I love Danny Boyle's work in that movie (though it's not as freaking amazing as Sunshine, his brilliant, award-less movie between two popular ones). Those pseudo-zombies made my heart stop more than a few times the first time I watched it. Alone, at night, in the dark. Amazing how conscious thought acknowledges there are no zombies and certainly none would burst into my room and eat me, but the fear response kicks in, anyways.

It's cool that this director guy is taking the matter so seriously, but you wonder if the end result will kind of suck 'cause he's making a film that happens to use a game engine, rather than a game cutscene? It's like, games try to be movies, which is wrong, because they're games. Cutscenes attempt to emulate a movie, at the expense of (usually) removing the elements that make a game what it is. I dunno, maybe if a film director does work on the cutscenes, they will turn out to be much better than their contemporaries. Possibly even better integrated into the game itself?
 

DaxStrife

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Nov 29, 2007
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Okay, I can see getting good zombie horror tones from 28 Days Later, but how do you get survival horror from MGS4? Maybe in the "survive sitting through this long, confusing, boring cutscene" way?
 

Krakyn

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DaxStrife said:
Okay, I can see getting good zombie horror tones from 28 Days Later, but how do you get survival horror from MGS4? Maybe in the "survive sitting through this long, confusing, boring cutscene" way?
I'm pretty sure you haven't actually played the game...I mean, why would you? You wouldn't start with the fourth game in a series, and if you didn't like the cutscenes in the previous MGS titles, you wouldn't have liked the ones in the fourth. So your input means nothing.

MGS is pretty much a game where you hunt the enemy; you hide in corners and wait for your prey. It seems simple to turn that "hunting" survival into a "hunted" survival; just throw a ton more enemies in and make the main character terrified. Actually, in most of the MGS4 cutscenes, Snake is being hunted. I can easily see how Sonzero would associate that tension with a survival horror game.
 

Ray Huling

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Feb 18, 2008
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Having watched all of the cut scenes, I'd like to add Scooby Doo, Where Are you? to the list of Sonzero's inspirations.
 

RedDiablo

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DaxStrife said:
Okay, I can see getting good zombie horror tones from 28 Days Later, but how do you get survival horror from MGS4? Maybe in the "survive sitting through this long, confusing, boring cutscene" way?
I think the guy meant that the cinematic quality of MGS4's cutscenes were good. He didn't mean he got horror from them, he just meant that the cutscenes were cinematic and not just bland.
 

Low Frost

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Brotherofwill said:
Mhhhmmm from what I've heard the game isn't supposed to be scary in the slightest, it isn't even considered a horror game by most anymore. In that regard he failed I guess, but that might just be part of the overall direction the game was going in.

He is right about the MGS4 scenes though, they are miles out of the league of all other games in terms of cinematic storytelling.
RE has never been truly frightening, although it has come close. Cheap, boo scares isn't real fear. Nemesis in 3, the invisible bugs in the sewers of RE4, those were good scary.