No Naming Names, part two

Yet more of the online style. As I said yesterday, there won't be any gradient-heavy strips in the near future.

The background for this one was murder to get - Vice City, much like the real world, is not the most obliging of settings to work in. I found myself running around the beach, waiting for the sun to rise so I could get a picture of the lighthouse and the street and the trees and the land in between all in one daylight shot. The first time, I got killed just when the sun was rising. The second time, I was just about to do a frame grab when it started raining. At that point, I'd had enough and looked up a weather cheat online to make the rain stop. It was also annoying that I had to position the score display in an empty patch of sky so that I could put fake clouds over the top quite easily.

It's quite an interesting experience, using a game as a virtual set for something -- I kept having to clear the set by firing guns into the air so people would scatter and not stand in the way. Even the bike on the picture is set dressing -- I stole it and parked it there, presumably as Halifax's vehicle in the game.

I'm aware the idea of using a computer game as a set isn't exactly new. I think someone made a series of animations filmed entirely in Halo, and I've heard of units in war games getting together to film in-game recruitment videos for their squad. (Seriously. I'm not joking.) Multi-player games lend themselves to this sort of thing, since you can actually direct action by having one player act and the other one 'film'. Peter Molyneux's latest idea seem to be along similar lines, dealing with both the artistic and the business sides of running a movie studio. He's also put in all the features you need to actually make your own movie, so you can live out all your Spielberg-esque fantasies.