Re: Re:

[Dan Lyke]

Morbus Iff wrote:
> I definitely agree with that. I was getting into a discussion of
> this with my boss (!!), and he said that people would never answer
> the questions if it even SEEMED like we were prying into their life.

In a perfect world, all of the questions have to be immersive. You
can't just ask people what their phobias are if you're going to play
off of them, in many cases they don't know themselves or the answers
are too long to give in a single setting.

What are things I'm irrationally afraid of? Well, for starters I'm
loathe to admit that I'm not rational, so I'm going to filter a bunch
of stuff off the top, but I come up with two or three things
anyway. However if I start to ask "what do I have a visceral or
reflexive reaction to?" it gets pretty big pretty fast.

For instance, I know people into bugs who are happy to have spiders
crawl on their hands. Now I know the poisonous spiders in my area,
I've see black widows and I think I could identify the brown recluse,
and I'm pretty cognizant of the fact that spiders eat bugs and
therefore are our friends, but I'll still go get a piece of cardboard
to move a spider.

I wouldn't have listed that as a phobia, but drop me in a realistic
simulation of a bunch of long-legged hairy spiders and the hair on the
back of my neck will crawl.

On the other hand, my family raised bees when I was young, and so I
don't run around flailing my arms screaming "get it away from me" when
confronted with stinging insects, unlike most other people I know.

Re: Changing lighting and mood based on character
> That's a WONDERFUL idea, actually. I can see the world changing now,
> based upon certain actions within the game, and not noticably.

When it's done best (at least for my tastes) it's very subtle, but
most movies aren't subtle at all and it still works. If you become
conscious of rim-lighting to separate a character from a background,
the difference between flat and and shadowed lighting for faces, and
watch how they're used in a fairly stylized movie (I don't see many
movies, but "Great Expectations" was the last movie from the "New
Releases" section at the video store I saw, and it really overdid
this), shows how much you can do with just light position.

Then go down to your local photography store and look at an 80A
filter. Notice how blue it is (about as blue as the sky, actually). Go
inside, turn on an incandescent lamp and realize that it takes looking
through _two_ of those filters to make that light look the same color
as mid-day sun. One of those filters if it's a halogen lamp.

If you've ever wondered what "color timing" is and why the color timer
gets a credit on films, they're the people who go through at the end
of the film and change filtration on a shot by shot basis, nominally
to color correct for processing differences, but if you get someone to
show you examples you quickly see that even the color timer, changing
filtration at a shot level, has the ability to completely change
reaction to a character by subtly altering the colors of a frame.

Dan