Home
IT'S A NEW TWIST ON AN OLD Hollywood refrain: What they really want to do is direct...CD-ROMs. Joining the army of actors who have ventured into multimedia, a growing number of film directors are shooting live-action sequences for interactive games.
John Lafia, director of the Ally Sheedy killer-dog thriller Man's Best Friend as well as Child's Play 2, lensed Corpse Killer, a zombie shoot-'em-up recently revamped for the Sega Saturn. Peter Maris, who made such straight-to-video actioners as Diplomatic Immunity, Terror Squad, and Ministry of Vengeance, helmed the best-selling, seven-disc haunted-house mystery Phantasmagoria. Peter Adair, praised for his PBS-aired documentaries Word Is Out and Absolutely Positive, directed the interactive courtroom drama In the 1st Degree.
Adair says he sought out the new medium so he could experiment with storytelling forms; Lafia and Maris happened into the work and later decided they liked it. The money isn't spectacular -- yet -- but the Directors Guild of America has high hopes for interactive entertainment. Potential job growth, says DGA spokesman Chuck Warn, ''is at least as big as the transition when our members went from working only on movies to working on movies and television.''
From Lafia's point of view, directing a CD-ROM isn't that different from directing a feature. ''There are actors. And there are sets. And there are scenes being staged,'' he says. ''And there is an overall story and mood.'' But these movie games do have their special requirements. For Phantasmagoria, as with many CD-ROMs incorporating live action, actors were shot against a blue screen so their footage could be dropped into separately rendered backgrounds. ''The decision [is] made to shoot a certain angle,'' Maris says. ''You're limited. While with a set you can move your camera, you can zoom in, you can dolly.'' (Maris says his next project, Alien Species, a movie and CD-ROM shot simultaneously, will employ conventional sets.)
Another challenge is to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer number of parallel scenes that have to be filmed to cover the myriad paths an interactive story might take. ''I spend a lot of time with actors just setting up what they're doing and trying to get them to not worry about it,'' Lafia says. '''Cause they cannot understand it and they're totally confused.'' I'm ready for my 47th close-up, Mr. DeMille.
