What is a Cut Scene?

By Meg Sugden
For our module we have to create a machinima based cut scene, but what actually is a cut scene? A cut scene is a sequence that features in a video game, usually interrupting it, in order to advance the story or give more information to the character. Usually this will use the in-game engine in order to create them and will normally be pre-rendered so that they run smoothly at 30-60 frames per second (fps) without interruption. During these cut scenes the player usually has limited or no control over them and they are used to advance and introduce new characters into the game play using information, dialogue and other techniques in a scripted events that is triggered at a certain points.

There are a few different ways of producing cut scenes and these can be animated, live action or even interactive. The first that I wanted to look at was live action cut scenes. These are used mainly if a game has been based off a film such as the The Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars games which had cut scenes that were just the movie scenes. These became very popular in early on game in the late 90s, early 2000s when video game storage space wasn't very high and couldn't perform as well as they can now so this was a great alternative to film based game. But soon, especially in the early 2000s was when a different type of cut scene started to emerge and many people and companies started turning to animated cut scenes as they had more money to spend, improving graphic qualities and better artistic direction was being formed.

So now that companies had more money they started to use an in-game engine to start creating their cut scenes. These are pre-rendered cut scenes that are animated by the game developers and use the same art style throughout the game and the cut scenes which is nice. But the difference in this technique is due to the fact that they are pre-rendered means that you can noticeable tell when there is a cut scene as the graphics improve so dramatically. But there can also be a technique for producing very high cinema-quality cut scenes that feature in games like Diablo III and World of Warcraft which do not have incredible graphics but will show there promo adverts in this way to entice people in further.

The last type of cut scene involves using pre-scripted sequences that involves the player to press buttons to advance the cut scenes but this isn't featured very often in games and is commonly known as a quick time event.

The cut scene idea that we are going to be using is an animated cut scene as this is what is required of us to create and due to the fact that cut scenes generally are very dull, we wanted to ensure ours had humour in it in some way as to keep the audience entertained and excited in all ways. The cut scene that we want to create should look great and aim to be cinema quality in the way in which we use atmosphere and music to improve.