TV insights into the filming of 'Last of Us' arcade scenes
Forum user JoshODBrown discusses being brought in by HBO to assist with the Arcade:
So ChanceKJ and I were brought in by HBO to work on this arcade for the show. Theres lots to unpack, so I'll be brief for now until i have some more time to explain some more stuff.
Inside the Mortal Kombat II cabinet was actually a 46 inch OLED panel that we rotated 90 degrees. The gameplay footage was all played and captured ahead of time by myself while Chance and I worked through the script, making sure we got all the moves down that they wanted to show (fatalities included). I treated the footage with scanlines, some curvature, and rounded the corners off so it looked a little more like a real CRT. We programmed an interface we could control remotely on the day that would instantly play a clip from the game on demand and basically played it back in real time with the actors as they shot the scene. So when you see them drop one coin in, thats an individual clip, 2nd coin, another clip, character selection, yet another clip and so on.
Sync'ing a camera to CRT displays can be done, but you really can only guarantee it'll sync with a few at a time. Some games stray slightly or drift, so even if you get the camera to sync, you'll lose the CRT and start to get some bad flicker at some point. For Cinematographers, there is a rule of 180 degree shutter. So if you're shooting at 24fps, 180 degree shutter angle will put you at 1/48 shutter speed. This is what gives you the cinematic look and feel and blur that we're all used to. You can change shutter angle slightly but it will impact the feeling of the movement of the shot. Obviously CRT refresh rate doesn't divide into 24/48 very well, so thats why you get the flicker.
While we got Mortal Kombat to MOSTLY look like a CRT on camera, it was an expensive process (time and money) and we did do it for a few other games in the arcade, but time was not on our side to make it happen for every game. Some games we killed the monitor completely (like the Asteroids deluxe), the thought was that after sitting for a bunch of years, a good chunk of the games are not going to quite work right. We were ready to kill Black Widow, but the director liked the look of it, so it was kept.
Some games we programmed to have a glitch or sync issue in. We had a few games legit shit the bed. There is a shot early on in the arcade scene where you can see a Buck Hunter game with a failed hard drive in the background and the screen is flickering. Totally plausible and we just ran with it!
In regards to another poster being afraid arcade games were damaged for filming purposes:
Nope! we didnt trash anything at all. No arcade games were harmed in the making of this show.
there were a half dozen games that were brought in from Toronto before we got involved, they are all scratch built LCD versions of games like Robotron, Galaga, Tetris, Centipede. We didnt love them, but we had to use them to fill up space in the arcade (if you watch carefully you'll see there are actually TWO robotrons - one real cabinet, and then the fake one behind Ellie when they are busting the change machine open). The rest of the games were brought in by myself or Chance, a handful of pinball from some friends in town, and a shitload of Atari games from another local collector.
Regarding the realities of licensing material for television:
Another fun fact. It is quite expensive to license some games to show in TV/Movies. Williams and Midway stuff seemed to be most expensive, while Atari stuff was super reasonable. Older stuff is easier to license.
We had some pinball machines and arcade games not make the cut because they were too expensive to license, or the IP owner wasn't licensing that particular game for that use at that particular time. We had a Ms Pac-Man that wouldnt clear because they were not allowing a license at that time. Golden Axe was axed, no BurgerTime, NBA Jam, or TMNT either. WWF Pinball, Evel Knievel, Comet. New titles from the 90s were all mostly too expensive to license or use, let alone trying to find some of them as most conversion games were all restored to original around here. Also forget about doing anything with Nintendo. Some licenses only allowed for showing the game in the deep background, or couldn't feature game play, but only attract modes (Street Fighter II for example). Its a complicated world, and you only have so much time and money to get it all done.
Fascinating stuff. There's more in the thread but these three posts jumped out at me as super interesting insights.
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