The Making of The Darkening (Steve Hilliker)

The Making of The Darkening
Production	Privateer 2: The Darkening
Type	Behind the Scenes
Run Time	8m56s

The Making of the Darkening is a featurette about the making of Privateer 2: The Darkening. It was produced by Goldhawk Film & Television Productions Ltd. and released online by Privateer 2 director Steve Hilliker on May 20, 2020. An alternate version was published by Fun Online in 1996.

• Download: MAKING_OF_THE_DARKENING-Hilliker.mp4

YouTube Description

Again, I rescued this from my Loft! Bradley Borum gave me this VHS way back in 1995! Bradley made 'The Making Of The Darkening' Hope she doesn't mind me uploading this now!

Transcript

NARRATOR: In the summer Electronic Arts went into production on four stages at Pinewood Studios to film a new form of entertainment, an interactive movie. The Darkening represents an unprecedented collaboration between the British film industry and the computer entertainment world. The movie-like game will be played and viewed on a computer as Electronic Arts negotiated the first interactive agreement with equity. A spokesman for the union said "this change and entertainment could in future be seen as important as the birth of television."

ERIN ROBERTS: We have basically about 80 to 90 crew members who are working here at any one time. It was very important to do it properly.

STUNTMAN: Today we've used real glass which is much more effective than the sugar glass you know you can use it looks so much more dramatic but obviously it's more dangerous. When I got up I can see all the glass shards floating in the area so I thought I better wash them out just in case.

STEVE HILLIKER We're shooting on film and tape. The main reason is it's not just a special effects, on tape is just because we need to ship high speed. I mean when you've got a lot of explosions if they shot on the first take which runs at normal you know 25 frames per second then then then it'd be over in a flash, literally here just go you know.

JOHN HURT: My role in in the piece is what is a barman but he's a barman in the busiest bar in space. really. it's a pretty rough and tumbly bar which almost everybody drops into at one stage or another so he knows everything that's going on.

CLIVE OWEN: A lot of the shots are my perspective. If I enter into a place to meet new character the camera will be my POV and then it's, and then once you're into a scene is pretty shot pretty much like a movi. You know so it doesn't feel any different, they just you know I'm the character that takes people through the games.

JOHN HURT: You don't change the character you just changed the situation.

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: I think it's fascinating. I can't wait to see how, you know, what it amounts to. I understand that six months in this business makes a huge difference. I played a warden of a planet prison called Hades and I work for a CIA organization. It's all futuristic, of course, interplanetary

MATHILDA MAY: When the director told me that the player would press the button that I would come into action I felt a bit like a doll, manipulated. We'll never know every line has got its point of view of everything is very organized.

BRIAN BLESSED: My daughter and her friends are more pleased about me doing list and say playing King Lear.

STEVE HILLIKER: I think it's more of a detective story and that's the way I'm playing it.

NARRATOR: Early on camera and compression tests like this one involving smoke were filmed and then compressed to check that the software was able to playback the image data rapidly enough to provide clear moving pictures. On average it takes roughly one minute to compress one frame of video. The Darkening's three hours of footage have taken about 2700 hours or two months to compress.

STEVE HILLIKER: You have to really really carefully plan every single shot. But we've got 689 setups that were actually storyboarding and every single shot has been worked out and all as I was storyboarding and talking to the art department they they then looked at the shots that I wanted and built the set.

PETER HIGGINS: What we decided early on was that we would we wouldn't waste money on very fine details. That we overdetail and we overscale and we use materials that would actually when the image was compressed would actually stand up and still read. We had just invented a really oversized light source up there.

STEVE HILLIKER: What's been really interesting is all the lighting styles and and all the different designs that you wouldn't normally have on that on a normal feature film, ou know for often quite quite small scenes. When you first see the characters here that the development isn't that long maybe in the future of the interactive is that there will be a chance to develop the characters a lot more but a you know it's like what is happening to a lot of moviemaking at the moment is that you know it's fast, everything os so fast paced and they you establish these characters so quickly. Making them more three-dimensional is in what they're doing maybe in the big closeups or in their eye movements maybe it's things with their hands and you know I've tried to put that in as much as I can.

JOHN HURT: Very simple clickety click silent movies into the talkies and the talkies into color then you got television which started changing things and then... therefore the film was pushed even further into wider screens and it just evolved further and further and I think this is the next real step in the evolution of visual arts.

Credits

Role	Name
Executive Producer	Paul Cleary
Producer	Bradley Borum

Links

• YouTube