"a block of wood" - the spark that ignited a decade of cinematic innovation

One day, the director of the production handed me a block of wood with three markers on it and said “this is your virtual camera, go shoot Max Payne with it”. I looked down at the block of wood perplexed, I thought to myself “oh hell no”. Little did I know, this planted a seed that put me on a journey to advance storytelling tools throughout my career. Since then, I have been chasing the ultimate goal and perfecting systems, features, and technology around that relentless question that keeps dancing around in my head “how can we tell stories more efficiently, cheaper, and faster”? One of the first advancements was to create a comprehensive Virtual Camera and Cinematic Toolbox and toss that block of wood out the window (although, it sits on a shelf as a relic of the past, and a reminder of how far we have come). Inspired by 1970’s ENG video cameras, we opted to buy a nonfunctional (and ancient) news camera from eBay. This thing was a piece of junk that no one wanted anymore. The camera didn't cost much, but hey it had character, it weighed just right, and most importantly it had a ton of internal space for bespoke hardware. We gutted the inside, added a digital viewfinder with a military-grade wireless adapter (for low lag), and connected it directly to Mobu. It was also connected to a Live Switcher MIDI device I helped develop for real-time assembly edits during live performances (another game changer I still use on all my games to this day). Now we are getting somewhere, still, it needed a bit of elbow grease, so we added real-time filtering and clever marker placement, then…eureka! We had a v-cam that looked and behaved like the real thing. Next, we attached a real 1970s telephoto lens, markered it up, and dialed it in as its own bone for manual zoom control. And there you have it, a fully-functional, hand-driven zoom lens driving the digital lens 1:1 in Mobu (and soon through a remote connection directly into the engine). This allowed for a true physically based cinematic shooting experience and put me on an obsessive path to advance our storytelling toolbox starting with developing a physically based depth of field system before physically based depth of field was a “thing”.

Fast forward to more than a decade later, and I have since been the architect for some of the most advanced cinematic technology in the medium, including advanced next-generation virtual cameras, advanced smart “procedural” lights, advanced smart “procedural” cameras, and fully procedural conversation system… but that's for a future blog post am I right? Innovation takes different forms, and sometimes, all it takes is a dumb block of wood to spark your imagination.?

-Joe Rubino