actors repeat the same actions. To make the shoot as efficient as possible was a bit of a
jigsaw puzzle, figuring out which actors to bring in on which days and when to let them
go, and is it more economical to move the camera one extra time so that we can send a
bunch of actors home early, or should we leave the camera where it is and pay the actors
for the whole day. That times nineteen days was a logistically very complicated film
shoot. With a lot of the action being filmed from multiple angles, since in the game, you
never know what angle the player’s going to see it from.
And once it was all shot, it must have been a tremendous challenge to keep it
all straight.
We did the editing on an Avid; without that I don’t know what we would have done. We
dumped it all onto huge hard drives on this Macintosh-based non-linear editing system,
and selected the frames we wanted. We pushed that Avid system to its limits. At one
point our film editor had to call tech support because the system was slowing down so
much. When he told them how many effects he had, they were startled, and couldn’t
believe it was still functioning. We had more frame dissolves in just one of our scenes
than they had anticipated anyone would ever have in a normal feature film. We were
picking still frames and dissolving from one to another, so that every frame in the game
was a special effect.
The official number is that we had forty thousand frames of animation in the game.
In comparison to an animated feature film, however, that number is misleadingly low. In
a typical dialog scene we’re dissolving between still frames on the average of once
every second or once every two seconds, whereas a conventional film runs twenty-four
frames per second. So to get the equivalent in terms of how much action we really cov-
ered, you need to multiply forty thousand by twenty-four. Also, a lot of frames are
reusable. You’ve got one hundred fifty frames of the character walking up the corridor
toward camera, then one hundred fifty frames walking away from camera. Using just
those three hundred frames, the train conductor character, say, might spend ten hours
walking over the course of the game. When you walk into the dining room, you see six
tables, and each table can have its own action going on independently. If you play the
game from start to finish five times, the sixth time you might see two characters in the
room together, whereas before they were always in the room separately. Just because
the action unfolds a little differently. So the number of combinations of that footage is
pretty much unlimited.
So what made you come up with the effect of dissolving between frames every
one or two seconds used inLast Express? Why didn’t you use the more tradi-
tional, full-motion style throughout the game?
From our point of view, full motion is basically an expensive special effect. It looks
great, as in the corridors, as in the fights. But if we had decided to use that for the entire
game, I think we would have ended up with something that was visually very flashy but
not very deep. We’re limited both by the amount of frames that can be kept in RAM and
by the number of CDs. But ultimately, you’re limited by the processor’s ability. When
you walk into the restaurant and it’s full of people, with a number of different anima-
tions happening on the screen at the same time, as well as multiple tracks of audio
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 331