The Sunday discussion - Duncan Harris, screenshot artist and owner of DeadEndThrills.com

[Gambit77]

In response to post #45051570. #45055660, #45064125, #45092390 are all replies on the same post.

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pancakemix wrote: Not sure how I feel about giving so much praise to the one taking screenshots. It seems like he's humble and puts a lot of work and love in to what he does, but what about games like Journey or Inside? It would be harder to take a bad screenshot then not for one of those games, and that's because the dev team made it that way, not necessarily because of skillfully taken screenshots.

I mean, how would you like it if you spent years creating a garden that's beautiful from every angle, only to have someone take full credit for a photo they took that IS beautiful, but only because of your work on the garden.

Again, this guy seems humble enough, I just feel we're not giving enough credit to the hard working level designers, concept artists and the like, who need to not only make something look good, but also make it fun to play without ruining performance or breaking the budget.

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BlindJudge wrote: Hey pancakemix,

I'm not trying to take a single iota of credit away from level designers, concept artists, animators, developers or anyone else involved in the creation of a game with this interview.

Screen-shot artists are incredibly skilled at what they do (just ask our image community) and are able to bring the best out of a game with their eye for detail. The only analogy I can provide is that I come from a photography background, and can attest that having a good team behind me and good subjects to work with will provide a smooth shoot and decent results - but it is still my skill behind the camera to take the shot.

So while the game developers and the team behind the final product are extremely talented, they do need to pass it on after completion to show it off. That person will be someone like Duncan.

I do hope you enjoyed the interview though. :)

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cicala wrote: no one is taking away credit from the developer, hence why images taken in this manner in a way of game photography aka screen archery is a way to show off a game in a new perspective, each photographer has their own style same applies to game photography.

Personally I despise Journey and Inside because they try to push style and art to the foreground while sacrificing the core factors that makes a game memorable aside from what is in the visuals.

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pancakemix wrote: I did enjoy the interview, thanks BlindJudge and Duncan.

I do recognize the talent, skill and effort that goes in to arranging a game's assets to take the perfect screenshot, particularly in games like those in the Fallout and TES series where nearly every scene is unique to each player, even before the inclusion of modding.

I guess what I was trying to say was that if screenshots are meant to represent a game fairly, then surely shots taken at random intervals would do. Obviously not, but if in the process of trying to "bring the best out of a game" they have to resort to hacking it I'm forced to question the ethics. I've never bought a game based on screenshots alone because even the best usually can't capture how the game feels to play, a particular moment, sure, but not the usual flow.

It's really not my intent to devalue a good screenshot, I only wanted the dev team to get some love too.

I actually found the info on how he has to hack some games to control his composition quite interesting. Neat stuff. In a non Beth rpg without toggle freecam or something similar I wouldn't even bother taking screenshots. I think it's cool the extent he goes to in order to create those possibilities in games that aren't screenshot friendly.

[geekminxen]

As someone who's getting more interested these days in screenshots, I really found this interview quite informative. Thank you!

 

It also reminds me of the quote, “There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.” I've take a lot of screenshots. Very few would be worth sharing. ;) I'm very impressed with screenshot artists!

[rominvictus]

Great interview, thank you.

 

Edited December 1, 2016 by rominvictus

[mati990]

In response to post #45031100. #45034390, #45036985 are all replies on the same post.

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BlindJudge wrote:

Here on Nexus Mods we have a very vibrant, busy and incredibly talented screen-capture community. I'm going to be spending time getting to know our artists and introduce them into this series to showcase some of their work, find out what makes them tick, what tools they use and if they have any tips for others.

Though to begin, I reached out to someone outside the community who I also hold in very high regard, the very humble and often elusive professional screen-capture artist Duncan Harris from ‘Dead End Thrills’.

His specialty is capturing beautiful images for not only his personal satisfaction but also for publishers/developers the world over. What started in life as a hobby for him has deservedly bloomed into a full-time career.

I first came to witness the work from Dead End Thrills when I was browsing one of the gaming publications that I subscribe to. The images I saw, though taken from a computer game, were worthy of space on a gallery wall. Truly pieces of art and I was in awe. I spent a good few hours browsing his website, after which I was determined to find the man behind them. Like I say, he is quite elusive.

I hope that you all enjoy this interview and give Duncan some Nexus Mods love.

Trying to find your name on your site is virtually impossible, and you don’t have any watermarks on any of your images. Though it seems you appreciate anonymity, would you mind letting us know a little bit about yourself and as to why your name doesn’t appear?

I don't plaster my name all over the site because I'm strong believer that the story should be the games, the art belongs to the developers, and that someone covering those in a vaguely journalistic capacity should be as invisible as possible. (Says the man currently doing an interview.) Few things get my back up like people who get that backwards, who make themselves part of the discussion. This does backfire a bit when people assume the site is run by some shadowy enclave of Flickr users, but I'd sooner that than spend any more words on the site than it needs. Gaming has more than enough of those already.

Can you disclose some of the titles you have worked on?

Horizon: Zero Dawn, Hitman, Adr1ft, Rise Of The Tomb Raider, Dishonored 2 and PlayStation VR Worlds are some recent ones that come to mind - the ones I can talk about, at least.

Have you always grown up with games, be it either in the form of consoles or computers?

Definitely. I was lucky enough to grow up alongside Britsoft during the ‘80s and ‘90s, owning computers from the Oric 1 to the C64, ST, Amiga, etc. My dad managed a Currys, so I doubly lucked out in that respect. Programming and hacking were inseparable from gaming back then, so it’s probably no wonder I’ve ended up with such a weird job/hobby. That was a time when you not only felt you owned every byte of the games you bought but were encouraged to mess with around with them.



Where did the name DeadEndThrills originate?

I think it was the title of an essay someone wrote about JG Ballard, though we’re talking almost a decade ago now. I was pretty desperate for a blog title and ended up on Google. Probably too late to change it now. The band Cubicolor just used it for one of their new tracks, which has completely messed up my vanity searches (which were rubbish anyway).

Although you say you’re not a photographer, there are examples of composition theories such as the golden ratio and the rule of thirds, did you ever get any form of training or research composition?

I certainly know of them, as they’ll often crop up in conversations with art directors and the like. I’ve never knowingly used one, though, in the sense of arbitrarily using one to try and make something work. That said, aesthetics is a science to some degree, so most of what looks good conform to one theory or another.

What first got you into screen-shotting games? How did that transition into a career?

I used to work in magazines, back when screenshots of games were seen as a vital companion to the text. Days would often be spent trying to find what looked best on the page, which is as much about the arrangement and choice of shots as their individual merits. Bear in mind we were doing this just with the game camera on things like PS2. Dead End Thrills came about around 2007 as a personal blog featuring (bad) shots of Oblivion, Prey, and later Wipeout HD. The idea was to at least try and improve the quality of screenshots used in the press, though it was just a lark in truth.

A publisher asked for some community stuff done, and it snowballed from there. I had a prior background in software engineering and graphic design so that mix of problem-solving, technical know-how, and working around the game industry for so long made it possible to speak the languages of both marketing and development, which I think was something of a rarity.



Is your niche in the industry tightly knit? Do you know other professional screen-capture artists?
Are there other artists out there whom you look up to and admire?

There are lots of professional screen-capture artists, and most are a whole lot better than I am. I don’t think people quite appreciate how many professionals there are who simply do this anonymously without ever seeking public approval or an outlet. You’ve got agencies building shots from scratch; marketing artists hired specifically to ‘pretty up’ shots based on WIP assets, game artists moonlighting when needed … a whole industry.

When does your work begin during the development cycle? Are you often working with titles well before they are released?

It varies. I’ve worked on games where billboard scenery from PS2 was still being used as the placeholder; where the bloom was so bad it looked like someone was dropping nukes inside the characters; where the enemies had no hair, no skin… every quirk and f*#@-up you can imagine. To varying degrees, editors and workstations never work. Some of the circumstances are dire, to be honest, but that’s development. There has to be a certain body of assets there to work with, though. I suppose ‘alpha’ is the earliest stage I’d come in, for what that term’s worth.



When you receive a build of a game from a developer, what kind of process do you go through to get the shots you are after? Do you work from a brief at all?

Yeah, there’s always a brief. The reason so little of my professional stuff ends up on the site is that the brief is often quite different to what I’d do for fun. You’re making the best of a bad situation with most promo shots, whereas I try and make the best of the best situation on the site. The process with publishers (it’s usually publishers rather than developers) begins with a lot of ‘umm’ and ‘you realise that’ and ‘oh for f-’ until you figure out what’s possible in the time you’ve got. The trick is doing all that in such a way that you cost the publisher as little as possible. To be brutally honest, I’m not proud of the stuff I’ve done professionally. That’s not really how it works.

Like modding, I imagine you need certain tools to get the shots that you’re looking for. Do developers provide you with any support to that end?

I do a lot of hacking nowadays. Debug builds of games aren’t ‘screenshot builds’, and there’s a lot that still needs to be done before you have all the tools you need. If you look at the Street Fighter V or No Man’s Sky shots on the site, I had to pretty much dismantle those games to do those. You can never really know enough in that regard, so I can spend dozens of hours on a game I never end up doing anything with, but it never feels like a waste of time. It’s homework. You have to bear in mind that the last thing a developer has time to do is help the screenshot monkey do something there isn’t a feature for, so that’s on you, really.

Some of the screenshots you have taken are often from fast-paced games (such as the Streetfighter series), yet the image is pixel-perfect timing. How are these achieved?

Okay, So for something like Street Fighter V. I break the game in such a way that when I hit pause, none of the pause menu shows up - it’s frozen. I’ve hooked the camera - two cameras, actually - so I can move that around by modifying the coordinates in memory. I’ve hooked DirectX so I can track and move the individual characters while the game’s paused, including rotating them. I’ve hooked PhysX so I can run and manipulate the physics simulation while the game is paused, avoid clipping. I’ve hooked the depth of field component of Unreal Engine 4, and the animation timescales for the individual characters so I can find complimentary poses. I’ve disabled the game’s opacity stencil technique, which is what effectively renders the 3D characters in 2D to avoid mesh clipping; that means I can have proper interaction between limbs, etc. I’ve disabled the hit FX and the glow shader on the characters. I think that’s it - unless you include all the usual modding to access unreleased characters, etc.



You have said that you can get screenshots upwards of 8K in resolution. Do you need a beefy computer setup to get these? How are they created?

Let’s stick with Street Fighter. Unreal will render at whatever size the window is. Using SRWE, which Skyrim modders might know already, you can tell it to render at HUGE resolutions for just the seconds it takes to grab the image. I’m doing Fallout 4 at the moment, though, and you don’t get that luxury there. Then there’s something like Quantum Break where I’m still trying to figure out how to render at over 4K.

With the release of Overwatch, the developers gave the player the ability to take 8k screenshots, though limited in where the camera is, what kind of tools would you like to see developers implementing into their games?

I’d like to see tools which the developers would use themselves. Though I appreciate the sentiment, I don’t like tools which are more like toys - where there are weird limits placed on things like camera movement and rotation because the developer’s vanity has suddenly kicked in post-release, or for some other strange reason. I don’t like it when console games are promoted with downsampled shots the public ‘photo modes’ can’t do. The last one is more of a technical issue, admittedly - games can trade performance for certain debug features during development - but I certainly wouldn’t waste my time taking 1080p shots of anything.

What are your thoughts on Ansel, the new screenshot tech recently released by Nvidia?

I helped with that to a small degree during development, and I think it’s a worthwhile venture. There're ways it can improve in terms of UI and user experience, but they seem to have found their audience for it.

Some of your images can evoke strong emotion, such as pity or sadness (for example some of the Tomb Raider series), suspense and horror (such as some of the Alien Isolation series) or awe (such as some of the Skyrim series). Do you intend to make an emotional response within the viewer?

I think it’s only natural to do that with any image. Why else would you bother? I suppose a lot of screenshots are taken just to show off a game’s technical fidelity - bragging rights and all that - but those are here today, gone tomorrow. The interest for me is in knowing that there’s a gap between how a game wants to feel and how it does, and that’s often necessitated by gameplay. When you take the gameplay out, just how far can you go?

One of my favourite shots is from your ‘Rise of the Tomb Raider’ series and is called ‘Rooftop Paradise alt’ (though I also love the standard ‘Rooftop Paradise’), do you have any favourite shots or ones you are most proud of?

Yeah, well, don’t get me started on the ‘alt’ business. I try and limit the number of shots published to avoid repetition, as just the slightest bit of that creates fatigue in someone browsing them. There’s also an argument to say that if you’re torn between two shots of the same thing, you just haven’t taken the right one yet. Or maybe that’s self-defeating. So yes, the alts are kind of a compromise there. My problem is that I often end up liking the alts more than the originals, to the point where I delete the original and confuse everyone.

There are a lot of shots I’d consider my favourites. I treat the site like a garden in a respect, and like walking through it from time to time. Ideally, they’d all be my favourites, as they don’t have to be far off for me to delete them. Any shot which is essentially perfect - where the composition works, where the fidelity is consistent, where there is atmosphere and drama - is a favourite. But there has to be a fair amount of creativity at my end for it to be worthwhile. That could be hacking, finding the right pose or lighting, or the multitude of things that go into a Bethesda RPG shot. In that sense, the shot you mentioned is okay, but it’s really just me snapshotting the developer’s work.



Do you ever get negative feedback or comments from people? How do you deal with this?

They’re not made directly, though. People sometimes repost the stuff on Reddit for whatever reason, which being a cauldron of negativity often responds by claiming the stuff’s Photoshopped or whatever. But that’s what happens when you put people into that kind of echo chamber environment. There’s no actual thought or reasoning behind those statements, so it’s not hard to ignore them. I do sometimes respond to them, though, if only to drop some facts into the equation.

When you play a game for casual fun, do you ever stop and think that a particular moment would be a good place to capture or are you able to ‘turn your work brain off’?

This is casual fun for me. I could literally count the number of games I’ve played traditionally on the one hand. Arkham Knight (which, internet be damned, I loved), and right now Thumper. I’m struggling already! I did try and play Fallout 4 properly until a quest bug destroyed my whole campaign, but I’m enjoying it more for the mods and shots. Then there are the games my kids play, but that’s more a case of me moaning the whole time about how cynically they’re emptying my wallet.

What would you say is your favourite genre of game to play? What is your favourite genre to capture?

Easy. Bethesda RPGs. I love the worlds. I love the modding scenes. I love that those games are, despite the occasional hiccup with patches, etc., open to modding by default. I love that it’s almost impossible to play these games on PC without sharing them in ways that reflect your tastes and peculiarities. I don’t begrudge people complaining about Bethesda’s (and indeed Valve’s) genuine screw-ups because I think it’s everyone’s job to ensure they stay true to what they’ve started. That said, it did make me laugh when Skyrim came out, and people complained that Creation Engine was ‘just Gamebryo again’. Did they not think how catastrophic the alternative might a have been: a closed, unmoddable, sleek and thoroughly boring new technology? Screw that. Gamebryo for life, baby.

Have you ever come across a game that is truly beautiful from start to finish? Where every moment you think to yourself, this would make an awesome screen?

Rise Of The Tomb Raider. Maybe GTA V. Probably Bloodborne. Blur, the racing game by Bizarre Creations, is one I often bring up. Thumper’s just come out, and that’s a basically a masterpiece in terms of focus and execution, not just in terms of visuals. I’m not saying all these games are beauty ‘from start to finish’ because in a game like GTA or Tomb Raider that’s impossible, but the technology and ambition of those games is overwhelming.



Are there any games coming up that you’re are really looking forward to getting hold of?

Tekken! Can’t wait for that to finally come to PC, especially as it’s Unreal Engine 4. I *suppose* I’m looking forward to the new Mass Effect, even if their cinematic vocabulary seems limited to the exact same s#*! they’ve always done. The cutscenes in that latest gameplay footage, in terms of what actually happens, could be from ten years ago. I’m actually quite keen to see what they’re adding to No Man’s Sky, as I believe it’s more than people are expecting. That game needed to offend just about everyone so it could shrink down to the Early Access title it always should have been, and I think it could be quite comfortable there. Just a shame it wasted to so much of people’s time and money in the process.

We have a very active and passionate screenshot community, if you could give any advice on how to pursue this as a career what would it be?

I honestly don’t know what to say! Bear in mind that there isn’t even enough work there for me to make a living out of - I shore it up with writing books, doing consultancy and the like - so I’m not even sure there is a career as such. If it wasn’t for the fact my wife is a doctor who puts up with a whole tonne of s#*! for a living, I doubt I’d be speaking to you right now. This continues to be a hobby that’s got out of control for me. It’s also worth restating that the professional side is almost completely different to the hobby side, and I’m not sure I’d call it fun unless you like problem-solving under strict and thankless conditions. I guess the recommendation would to go the journalistic route, and treat this as a way of appreciating and discussing games. Make it part of something complementary, as you’re far more likely to enjoy it that way, and you might even afford to eat something.

Finally, it’s been a pleasure to view your work, and I’d highly recommend to any of our community members that are reading this to go and check out www.deadendthrills.com, it’s truly beautiful!

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Ethreon wrote: Those screenshots are gorgeous!

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zcul wrote: I fully support what Ethreon said.
Thanks for this informative interview.

... Edited December 3, 2016 by mati990