The Darkening 25th Anniversary Restoration

The Darkening 25th Anniversary Restoration
Production	Privateer 2: The Darkening
Type	Cinema Cut
Run Time	1h7m56s
Date	1996

The Darkening 25th Anniversary Restoration is a cinematic cut of footage from Privateer 2: The Darkening. It was released by director Steve Hilliker on May 20, 2020 on YouTube. The footage has been edited down from the game but where available it is of much higher quality than the original.

• Download: priv2_hilliker_remaster.mkv

Opening Crawl Text

25 years ago I directed the live action sequences for the first interactive movie in Europe. It was originally called 'The Darkening' - the Privateer 2 title was added later as a marketing device by Electronic Arts and the gameplay was reworked to encompass the original Privateer game ethos. We never changed anything during the film shoot or post production to encompass this 'Privateer Universe' it was always just 'The Darkening' during this period. The original title for the screenplay before production was called 'Darkside'. I came to the project initially with a meeting at Electronic Arts where I was shown projected footage of a previous game they had been working on. I wasn't impressed, cameras couldn't move etc. They explained that this was due to technical limitations of game video compression. What I could see though looked like a cheap rip off of Star Wars. I said I wasn't interested. Several months later I got a call from Electronic Arts - Erin Roberts said he was impressed with my honesty and could they have a second meeting with me! They valued the fact that I knew little about computer games and wasn't particularly interested in them! I was presented with a massive script and told to have a good read of it and come up with a shooting and ideas treatment. The unconventional script was initially very difficult to grasp -getting 'into' a few pages and then having to go to page 32 if you do this or page 64 if you do that etc was very disorientating. I remember Steven Crossley who plays Hal Taffin asking me if he could see the various interactive pathways for the role. The only way we could show him was sticking all my storyboards for his sequences on the Production Office wall at Pinewood with colour coded 'pathways'. It took up a large proportion of a wall! Steven walked into the office, saw what was on the wall, turned to me and said "I leave it to you!" We generally protected all the cast from those technicalities. I made them feel like it was an acting workshop on set. We do angry character then we do calm character with and without gun, with money, with trust, no money, no trust etc etc. I think they all enjoyed working on 'The Darkening'. In fact Jeremy Zimmermann my casting director told me there had been so much good feedback from all the cast. It was an incredibly happy set. I had worked with many of the crew before on other Drama and commercials.

There had to be new Equity agreements with the actors working in computer games and cyberspace. Electronic Arts was very committed to this. The deal ended up being very profitable for the actors. Good! Despite rumours, the budget for filming 'The Darkening' was only around L2000000. We had to complete three hours approx of final screen time footage and as my AD John Dodds commented at the time - "we are shooting faster than 'Eastenders'!" The shoot was only six weeks long so it was a necessity to shoot fast. We had four stages at Pinewood with production design crews creating and destroying sets as we went - amazing. With nearly 700 setups (some complicated with stunts, blue screen etc) and no overtime (due to budget) that is tough but with my amazing brilliant crew and cast we did it.

We always wanted to shoot on film but initially couldn't because the video game compression could 'see' the grain and corrupt the files. We were also limited to 256 colours which affected all design and lighting. We shot on the then new digital videotape format and finally got news from the software engineers that compression codecs had improved to such an extent that we were able to shoot some sequences on film later in the shoot. There were meant to be several wide angle CGI extended sets in the final film but although often shot there was no budget or time to finish them. We had to shoot interactive frames showing the sets at their widest (these were heavily CGI'd) with characters being introduced. These basically acted as the wide establishing shots. Unfortunately I haven't been able to include these in this restored version. Post production was very long. The guys in Manchester developing the game into Privateer had so much work to do it was decided to delay the launch for a year. It also meant we wouldn't have our CGI extended sets. Erin Roberts asked me to stay on for a further four months to oversee posting of the live action. During this time 'The Darkening' cinema feature was being talked about. The cast and crew were excited by this. Erin asked me to direct it. I had ideas of setting it on a gothic victorian fairground planet! It's a real shame it never happened. Loved to have developed those characters further.

The music and sound was a huge part of the production. A lot of the sound design was created brilliantly from scratch using samplers etc. An enormous amount of work and care went into it. It is still so enjoyable to listen to today especially on a good sound system.

I could never take the script too seriously and with the rewrites it was made even more bonkers and yes all those 'odd' moments throughout the film and Brian Blessed character changes etc are intentional and still make me laugh today - in fact it is part of his character - would you trust him or not? I wanted to make the short film sequences as entertaining as possible. A reward for all that hard gameplay I guess. Some characters are intentionally 'bigger than life'. There was little screen time for each performer to develop their characters properly so we developed ways around that during rehearsals, costume design and makeup. It was great fun. Later that year editor Andy Walter and I were invited to see some of the movie finally in the game. It was disappointing to see. The compression of the footage was poor. Picture and sound was running at I believe 1 6 frames a second. After all the hard work this is what it had come down to. We were expecting too much for the time. After all, this was long before DVD/BluRay and the processing power we take for granted today. It was amazing it worked at all! Even then you were still going to have to get a powerful PC, Graphics and Sound Card to run this game. EA seemed very happy, though to be honest we were a little disappointed.

I never saw the game again. Interesting to note that most of the cast and crew have never seen a frame of 'The Darkening'. Unless you were a gamer you had no access to it. We never had a press screening or premiere. It sort of vanished. I did hear from EA that the game had done very well financially. From a career point of view I gained very little (except Chris Walken had recommended me to a production house in Hollywood to direct a feature but it never happened). No one seemed to get it or were particularly interested in interactive movies anymore. It faded away. I did have a trailer of it on my showreel for a while which no one really understood. They hated the digital video look as well! How things have changed. Two years ago I thought I would track down the original digital master of 'The Darkening' only to be told that it had been destroyed years ago when the post production company had junked their digital tape machines. I knew my editor had Beta SP tape copies from the master which he had kept. He tried to get them copied but both tapes snapped! There was no decent copy left (except the poor quality stuff you can see on YouTube). I remembered doing a copy from those Beta SP's to a digital 8 tape twenty odd years previously and dumping it in my loft never thinking I would ever need it! What you see now is 'The Darkening' carefully restored from those digital 8 tapes. It has been regraded and AI'd to HD using Davinci Resolve Studio. Obviously it will never match the quality of the original masters. I have only used one interactive 'pathway' and haven't included any gameplay which might make some people wonder where some of the action is! I have had to lose a fair amount of footage! This is so nostalgic. I made many friends. Hope all the surviving cast and crew will enjoy the next hour or so and have many happy memories of what we all did at Pinewood that very hot April and May of 1995.

Steve Hilliker

YouTube Description

25 years ago I directed live action film sequences for the first interactive movie in Europe. Originally it was called 'The Darkening' but became better known as 'Privateer 2 The Darkening' for Electronic Arts. We had a great cast including Clive Owen, John Hurt, Christopher Walken, David Warner, Mathilda May, Brian Blessed, Jurgen Procknow, David McCallum, etc.

Recently I discovered that all the master tapes were sadly destroyed many years ago. Using only my surviving domestic Digital 8 copy (rescued from the loft) which was recorded from a 2nd generation Beta SP I have used DaVinci Resolve Studio Super Upscale 'AI 'software to save and regrade what I can. Obviously this can never match the original masters.

As most of the cast and crew never saw a single frame of the original (they weren't gamers!) and there was no press screenings or premiere of the footage I thought it was fitting after all these years to try and put something together. I haven't included any gameplay, only movie footage with one interactive 'short' pathway.

Pure Nostalgia - I had a great cast and crew! So this is especially for them and any one else who is interested in what we got up to on four stages at Pinewood during those very hot months of April and May 1995!

Paul Hughes/Steve Hilliker Conversation

Preserved from the YouTube comments for posterity.

@Paulie68000
Cheers for this Steve - I was lead programmer on Privateer 2 in Manchester. It was a wild ride for sure. Gotta add (to defend my most learned colleagues in Manchester, Slough and Canada) that the video compression, for that time, was as bleeding edge as it got - as you say, before P2 everything was locked off shots with little to no movement - we had to come up with some pretty radical techniques at the time to deal with whip-pans, tracking shots, sudden lighting changes) I was pretty proud of it, but can totally understand for you and the crew it wasn't anything like the (at the time) state of the art Mpeg1 - which required custom PC hardware to decode. If memory serves it was running at 640x480 (320x240 under the hood) at 15 fps with stereo audio, with an adaptive 256 colour palette. I do remember all the outtakes from Brian Blessed - I wish we still had them - I laughed apoplectically for days watching those sweary takes back. Thanks for this - it brought some great memories back. - Paulie.

Steve Hilliker
Hey Paul, brilliant to hear from you. I do remember you all working flat out in Manchester to get the game as good as possible. The enthusiasm was absolutely amazing. I had to learn so much in a short space of time about gaming and that magical word 'interactive!'

You were all so helpful to me. What surprised me was how small the crew was in Manchester. Incredible what you all achieved. Yes I laughed with Brian on the shoot through 'those takes'. It wasn't in the script to come out of character either - we just did it for a laugh! Still love that sequence today - it was great seeing it again. It was amazing we only had Brian for six hours on set.

Mega regards to you Paul and all the team in Manchester 1995-1996.

@Paulie68000
@stevehilliker3781 So many tales to tell ! :) What a wrap party we had at Pinewood! Dodgems galore! A few of us went for a sneaky peak at the 007 sound stage too. Hope you're safe and well - they were great days. Clive was the consummate professional. Quite amazing what you pulled off on such a small budget - Wing Commander IV got 10 million to play with after Privateer 2!

@stevehilliker3781
OMG Paul - Yes I remember those Dodgems at the end of shoot party - were they 'super charged ?!" I heard that extra voltage may have juiced them up a bit or was it the alchol! What I couldn't tell anyone at the time was it wasn't the end of shoot - we still had another day to do on Kronos! We never used all the explosives on that set - they were wired to go but we ran out of time. Yep, I sneaked onto the 007 set as well - they were shooting 'Mission Impossible' with Brian DePalma ( one of my heroes). So jealous- they were shooting only three setups a day!

@Paulie68000
@stevehilliker3781 It was a fantastic night. Man, that final Kronos sequence gave me nightmares for weeks trying to get it to compress without turning into a blocky mess of Ceefax like artefacts :o) Things like this gave way to better and better video playback to the point where just dropping in H.265 video is a walk in the park nowadays. You were a pioneer! I'm sure I have an article from Variety or something similar about the whole approach taken for Wing Command and Privateer 2 - working with real directors and real movie companies. I'll have to see if I can dig it out.

@stevehilliker3781
Hi Paul, I can't imagine how tough it must have been to compress that Kronos sequence. Most of the sequence was shot on film - much higher dynamic range than tape. Thank goodness we lost loads of shots over the two days on set and didn't let off tons of explosives that were all wired to go. A blessing in hindsight! Mega regards!

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