#Left 4 dead 1 intro movie#
We began making animatics in mid summer as we started fleshing out the story and pacing of the piece, bringing in external test audiences to view the movie and provide feedback. In order to evaluate projects as we go along, our filmmaking team prototypes and tests our movies on external test audiences, just like the gameplay teams. To do this, we will show four different versions of the first half of the movie from various stages of production. In this blog entry, we'd like to share with you some insight into the process that led to the intro movie that shipped with Left 4 Dead. Starting a game with a movie was a new approach for us, but luckily we have built up some moviemaking expertise in the past few years with the Team Fortress 2 shorts. As a result, we decided that it would make sense to begin the game experience with a non-interactive introductory movie that could get players revved up and subtly cue them to important gameplay mechanics such as "light disturbs the witch" and "car alarms attract the horde." We didn't want a slow ramp-up in gameplay to take away from that tension. Traditional in-game training mechanics didn't make sense for Left 4 Dead, because they would take away from the sense that players had been immediately dropped into a very real, very dire zombie apocalypse. Double win.The Moviemaking Process: Left 4 Dead's Intro Movie DecemJason Mitchellīecause Left 4 Dead is a new property for us, we wanted to provide some basic player training prior to the start of the game. Learning is fun! And so is not having your brains eaten. If you bother to watch it, you learn things. The intro plays all of the leitmotifs as it introduces the “special infected”. I also think Left 4 Dead deserves a bit of kudos for its musical tutorial slash intro movie. The focus turns from killing things to surviving.
If you only hear a bit of music that tells you they’re coming but not from where, you flail around nervously and fire off a few shots at anything that moves, less ignorant but powerless and scared because your impending death could come from anywhere. But musical information is not usually directional. If you can see a horde of zombies coming at you, you know where to aim. But a leitmotif-laden soundtrack gives Left 4 Dead a touch of cinematic panache and it gives you a heady dose of prescience, which is actually quite terrifying. It could have been a “shoot everything that moves” game like Quake or something, with a suitably “make all the noise” soundtrack. Leitmotifs are a nice touch for a game like Left 4 Dead.
#Left 4 dead 1 intro pro#
John Williams, who wrote the music for Star Wars and Indiana Jones, apparently loves leitmotifs heaps, and I think he probably got pro tips on their use from Wagner or Strauss or someone.
That music comes to your mind because it’s repeated when those characters have important on-screen moments - they’re like musical name tags for those characters. If you’re not familiar with the term “leitmotif”, listen to the music that comes into your head when you think of Darth Vader or Indiana Jones. It uses leitmotifs for each kind of zombie you fight, and even one for the zombie horde that comes to eat your brains if you noob it up too much. Left 4 Dead almost smacks you in the face with its musical cues. I’m going to write a few posts about pointing things out with music, because the games I’ve been playing lately all seem to do this differently and I think that’s kinda cool.
I started to listen a bit more closely to the music when I was playing games, and here we are. Pretty soon I realised that the tone clusters and the descending semitones Bernard Hermann used to freak people out in Psycho were also used in Left 4 Dead to the same effect. About the time I was first playing it I took a course at uni on film music, during which the lecturer took us through the music of Psycho. Left 4 Dead is the game that got me into the whole video game music thing.
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