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The make of The Surveillant: a thesis project ""postpartum""

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The make of The Surveillant: a thesis project ""postpartum""

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Content Page 1 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant The Make of The Surveillant A thesis project “postpartum” By Chao Chen Master of Fine Arts Interactive Media & Games Division School of Cinematic Arts University of Southern California May 12, 2017 Page 2 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Abstract This paper provides a deep look inside the making of The Surveillant. It includes the origin of this project, the research work was done to provide references, the different directions of experiences, the obstacles met when exploring the new way in interacting with live-action footages, the solutions we figured out, and the next step of this project. Page 3 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Table of Contents The Idea ........................................................................................................................................................ 4 Initial prototype: 1201 Housing .................................................................................................................... 5 Reflect on the outcome ................................................................................................................................. 5 Challenge ...................................................................................................................................................... 6 Design and Experience Goals ....................................................................................................................... 8 Prior Arts ....................................................................................................................................................... 9 Mechanics: Design and Solutions ............................................................................................................... 11 Development: What went well and what could have gone better ............................................................... 13 Next Step ..................................................................................................................................................... 17 Work Cited .................................................................................................................................................. 18 Figures ........................................................................................................................................................ 19 Page 4 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant The Idea The idea of The Surveillance came from a class project. It was the second project in Andreas Kratky’s CTIN 543 class, and the requirement was, briefly speaking, to tell a non-linear story. Generally, non-linear narrative is understood to be where is “different choices lead to different consequences”. For instance, in the game The Walking Dead, “The decisions you’re making in the moment have ripples that go throughout the entire adventure.” But due to technological restrictions, game designers are not able to give players unlimited freedom; what we can provide are prefabricated options. That was not I wanted. In my opinion, although artists are able to create a great story by providing options and corresponding endings, as soon as players feel that they “can’t find what they really want to do in these options”, the sense of freedom is destroyed. How can we fix this? How can we provide players infinite freedom, or at least make them feel as though they are infinitely free in a story or game? Fortunately, I was reading something about postmodern. In postmodernism theories, one opinion about audiences’ involvement claims that audiences’ understanding of the artwork is a vital part of games. I totally agreed with this, and generated this idea. Why didn’t I just create a linear story, but let audiences watch it in a non-linear way? Page 5 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Initial prototype: 1201 Housing To ensure a smooth, immersive experience, any jump-out options would not be used. Instead, players are allowed to switch between different film clips freely. Four films are combined, each of which was shot in different rooms of the same house. The house had three bedrooms and one living room. These four films had the same timeline and but they took place in different spaces. People in this house were driven by different motivations to move around in this house. The story was about four roommates living together. One day they have a guest, a pretty girl come to visit one of them. But after a power shortage, she is murdered. I also created more conflicts and suspense between people, to indicate that the relationships between four roommates are not common. For instance, Steve, the guy who is monitored by CAM2, has a strong interest in the visiting girl Penny; Chao, the guys watched by CAM4, sneaks into Steve’s room to search something. The atmosphere of this film I wanted to build was suspense. I wanted to fulfill players’ mind with doubt and curiosity. Audiences switched among four cameras to watch what is happening in four rooms. They chose to either follow a character from one room to another or focus on one room to see what’s going on. If they think they missed anything, they could play back to see what was missing. In this project, I wanted to give players “freedom” in both time and space. To generate a sense of “I’m actually watching them”, I made the video look as though it was shot by CCTVs cameras. I used a giant tripod to shoot from ceiling height. I rendered films into black and white and added time tags and room tags. Reflect on the outcome The first playtest session was in a class of thirteen testers. One of them played my game on big Page 6 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant screen, and the others discussed it. It went much better than I expected-- I expected players spent fifteen minutes in it, but they watched it over and over again for thirty minutes! After several playtest sessions, I gathered much useful feedback. In terms of my initial objectives, this project achieved its goal. The story itself is not unique, but the way players read it to make the experience unique. Almost every tester gave positive feedback about the suspense atmosphere, the interactive way to experience the story, and they were willing to see a better- polished story. About the weakness part of this project, testers mentioned that the beginning of the story was not compelling enough. They would rather the story starts with the murder scene, and players have to play back to see what happened. Generally speaking, a more eye-catching start may make the story better. I still have no idea how to extend this project. I tried several ways to combine live action films with different gameplays. They all work, but I did not find any chance to put them together or make the best use of any one of them. That is something I am exploring and want to use in my thesis. Challenge The combination of full motion video and game are rarely seen nowadays, but it has a history of gaming all the way back to the 80’s. Unfortunately, these games didn’t really integrate the video and the interaction well. They provided popup options or interface buttons for players to interact with and used hard footage transitions to react to players’ input. These methods worked but broke the sense of immersion. When watching film style footage, players have the expectation of being engaged in the story passively. But the popup options drag players out of their safe zone and force them to proactively make decisions. Also, the hard footage transitions made the interactions less convincing and immersive. Page 7 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant That’s why, in the last thirty years, there has only been one successful full motion video game, Her Story. With proper design, I believe that the combination of live action and interactivity will generate more impactful experience. Solution The Surveillant will utilize the surveillance aesthetic and desktop simulation to integrate the interaction and narrative. The player is allowed to: 1. Not only watch the footage, but also control the way interact with them. Player can play, fast forward, playback and switch amongst the clips. These actions will all fit within the overarching narrative (see prototype 1201 Housing). 2. Monitor the phone call made by characters in the surveillance cams, and record their dialogue for future use. 3. Make phone calls as a fake identity to the characters player is watching, using the audio clips recorded in prior phone calls made between characters. There will be more design solution details in “Mechanics: Design and Solutions” section. Page 8 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Design and Experience Goals The design and experience goals didn’t change much since the beginning. The details and the way they are described are modified several times, in order to provide better guide for making design decisions, but the vision of entire experience remains the same. Experience Goals: Players will experience catharsis by unfolding a mysterious, suspenseful thriller tale. Player will experience the excitement of snooping others' ulterior secrets. Player will experience the thrilling twist from being a predator to a prey and they’ll get thoughts provoked by the experience. Design Goals: The control will be approachable for non-gamers. The live action film content will be like “streaming” instead of “recording”. Use meta elements to engage players emotionally Page 9 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Prior Arts To expand the prototype to a thesis, a wide range of prior art works are reviewed as references. Paranormal activity 1 Paranormal Activity is a horror movie. A young couple lives in a house and they found there were some paranormal thing happened. They bought a camera to record everything when they fall asleep. It’s successful for its well written story and the smart use of surveillance aesthetic. Paranormal Activity provides top level Her Story 2 Her Story is a desktop simulation thrill game, which uses film content as its major narrative elements. Players search through a database to find video clips of fictional police interviews. They need to use the information they found in films to figure out what’s the truth behind a missing man. The reason Her Story becomes my major reference is because it not only successfully made the best use of film footages by proper game design but also achieved strong emotional impact with the integration of gameplay and narrative. It’s what exactly I want to achieve. The Tenant Downstairs 3 The Tenants Downstairs is a horror novel written by Giddens Ko from Taiwan. The story is about a landlord who installs hidden cameras in his tenants’ rooms to snoop them and manipulate them by using the secrets he knows. The theme is about humanity. The landlord believes that 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal_Activity_(film_series) 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_Story_(video_game) 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenants_Downstairs Page 10 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant everyone is wearing a mask to cover the dark side of their inner world. This is what I want to explore. What will players do if they know the secret of other people? What choices will they make if they have same power as this landlord? Following 4 Following is Christopher Nolan’s first feature film. A young man follows strangers on the street. One day, he follows a man in suit but gets caught. This man in suit claims that he’s a serial burglar and invite the young man to join him. As the story goes, the young man is enticed to do worse things and finally kills an innocent person in burglary. For the story part, this film is an inspiration for my story structure. Nolan created suspense at the beginning and the outcome was saved until the last moment of the film. Also, the character reveal worked very well. The difference between who they were at the beginning and at the end is thinking-provoking. The dramatic tension Nolan created made audiences discuss and rethink plots and details even after watching. For production aspect, this film was “designed to be as inexpensive as possible to make” and this is my spirit of making film part of my thesis too. 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Following Page 11 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Mechanics: Design and Solutions We are very clear about the aesthetic of this project before we start more. Considering that we are using live action footages as major assets, we need to think about how to use these footages to reach our goals. Our options of interaction are limited, that’s why we had to decide in which way we want players to interact with surveillance footages before we know how do we want to unfold the story. 1. Surveillance Surveillance is the design foundation of this project. It provides the sense of snooping the others’ secret and provokes player’s curiosity. It also provides the freedom of exploring the story, as the “Initial Prototype: 1201 Housing” section says. It’s an elegant design, proved in tons of playtests. It’s simple, enjoyable, and easy to implement. The only challenge comes from the “playback” function. No game engine is able to render a video backward in real time efficiently. It costs too much. We pre-render backward videos for every footage. When the player plays back a scene, we switch to the correspondent backward video and play it at the right timing. 2. Monitor phone call The idea of “I want to hear what they are talking about” came from some of our play testers. They have the urge to know more about what happened in the house instead of just guessing. Page 12 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant 3. Fake phone call We tried many different ideas about how to allow the player to interact with the character in the footages naturally but still serve the design and experience goals, such as controlling the power of the house, turning on and off the light, or manipulating the electronics. They don’t work for different reasons, mostly because it’s very hard to make it with live action assets. At last, we decided to do fake phone calls. It gives the player an opportunity to get deeper involved in the story in the house without influencing the story. Either player makes the phone call or not, the story itself remains the same—but the story in player’s brain changes. Let’s take Hitchcock’s Vertigo as an example, when you watch the second half of the move, you find the meaning of some dialogue in the first half changes because you know more information about characters and behind stories. This is how fake phone call works: call the characters you are watching as their friends, family members or others, you’ll know more about the story. The reason we choose fake phone call instead of making a direct phone call is to keep the suspense atmosphere. Talking directly with the character will break the sense, but as a fake identity, the suspense becomes stronger. Will they find out? How do I avoid that? The intensity level goes up because of player’s control. Also, using the audio clips recorded from characters’ prior phone calls can control the scope of this system. There are limited numbers of phone calls, which means there are limited options of audio clips for players to choose from, which means the complicity of dialogue branches can be controlled at a doable level. Page 13 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Development: What went well and what could have gone better Four things that went well 1. Collaboration and team management Making game is not only about creative, but also about team work. I do admire the persons who can solo a great game—for example, Jonathan Blow—but I don’t think it’s the best way. In my opinions, the best way of collaboration is a bunch of professionals in different discipline work closely together, and push their part as far as possible with self- motivation. I applied my theory in my thesis team. I tried to keep an open atmosphere within the team. Everyone is encouraged to express their opinions and every opinion is considered. Every time someone brings up something he thinks important, I write it down in our shared docs and it will be either discussed in our next meeting, or I explain why it’s a good/not the best solution for our project. It works well. Everyone has strong motivation now to make their part better, without anyone tell them to. 2. Meeting efficiency Meeting efficiency confused me a lot before. Game developers are all creative people, which means our thoughts sometime become divergent and lost focus on the topic. To change this, at beginning of every meeting, I list out the topics of today’s meeting and an estimate meeting time. The topics give everyone a clear goal of this meeting, which make them more focus; the estimate meeting time is a parameter to tell them how long they need to be focus. It’s easier to focus when there is a certain time, instead of “we’ll finish meeting when we complete the discussion”. 3. Tech solution Page 14 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Our goal is to make a “real time” playing experience. The game time is exactly same as the real time, which means the tech solution must be very reliable and stable. One blank frame could destroy the immersion. At beginning we were using Unity’s movie texture. But it was designed to simply play some video in game environment, such as a TV screen. We researched and tried different solutions, finally we found a Unity-add on matches our need perfectly. Another thing we made to improve the entire project is a Jason file. In the file, there are some parameters to control the footages and dialogues, even game progress. It makes the iteration easier and faster. 4. Game design The game is not finished yet, it’s too early to talk about over all game design. But I think our design wisdom worth mention, especially the fake phone call system. Interact with live action footage in real time is tricky. We want to avoid the feeling of “they are switching video clips”, with our characters in the canvas. We make the best use of surveillance art style. Our footages are shot in twenty-four frames per minutes, but in the post editing, we lower it to eight frames per minutes. It means that character’s mouth movement is not clear—you can tell he is speaking but you can’t know if his mouth movement matches the voice content. This unique feature of surveillance footages allows us to: 1) At most switch points, we play the correspondent audios to match character’s mouth, instead of switching videos. Page 15 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant 2) If we had to switch videos, we switch them when NPC is saying something (player has no control at this moment), to avoid the feeling of switching. Also, we designed a video streaming lag effect to make it look better. Four things that could have gone better 1. Project management The project management didn’t go well in this project. It was caused by the conflict of my creative part and management part. Being the creative lead and the project manager at same time seems to be an awful idea. When they have conflicts, my creative instinct tells me that we need more time to make the design or story better. Being falling behind for months, I realized that project schedule must be respected. Without following the producing plan, with too much attention and time on details, it will hurt the overall experience—and that’s what’s the most important. 2. Scope control This is something I paid attention to at very beginning but still not did well. I was expecting a forty-five to sixty minutes experience, with five to six fake phone call opportunities. It turns out that I can only shot for a ten to fifteen experience with one fake phone call. The causes of this consequence are 1) Failure in project management 2) Underrate the difficulty of making live-action assets 3. Playtesting and iteration There’s no need to emphasis on playtesting and iteration. It’s the most reliable way to push a game to higher level. In this project, we did a lot of playtesting for each individual Page 16 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant system, but very few for the entire project. It’s because we didn’t reach the vertical slice step yet. Fortunately, we are very close to it, so we are about to run more playtesting on the overall experience. 4. Story writing The story writing almost lead the project to a wrong direction. To find references for this project, I watched many movies, including classic suspense thriller made by Hitchcock and some other modern crime movies. My first version of story was very film like. The story is in the frame of four-camera surveillance view, but most plots are happening within one room. It lost the advantage of interactivity and became very linear. Now we already got rid of this idea and trying to create a simultaneous-multiple-story experience. Page 17 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Next Step This project requires another six months of development. We are going to: 1. Improve the UI performance to serve the experience better; 2. Add side features to enrich the experience; 3. Shoot live-action assets for full game; 4. Playtesting and iteration; 5. Usability test with RITE method to find potential problems in UX; Page 18 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Work Cited Talese, Gay. “The Voyeur’s Motel” The New Yorker Web. April 11, 2016 <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/gay-talese-the-voyeurs-motel> Page 19 of 19 The Make of The Surveillant Figures Figure 1 Player is monitoring target making phone call

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Asset Metadata

Creator Chen, Chao (author)

Core Title The make of The Surveillant: a thesis project ""postpartum""

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 05/08/2017

Defense Date 05/04/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag analysis,CCTV,fake phone call,live-action,monitor,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,surveillance,usability,video games

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Fullerton, Tracy (committee chair), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member), Wixon, Dennis (committee member)

Creator Email charliechen.bupt@gmail.com,chen909@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-371092

Unique identifier UC11255940

Identifier etd-ChenChao-5321.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-371092 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ChenChao-5321.pdf

Dmrecord 371092

Document Type Thesis

Rights Chen, Chao

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA