We held thirty-one production meetings for Twenty-Fifth Hour. The AI team was there. The game engine team, the camera department, the directing and production departments. I have been going back through the records lately, and the composition never changed once. My sound designer was not in a single one. This was not a falling-out. My sound designer was involved from the script stage, earlier than almost anyone. We talked constantly — about silence, about water drops, about h

A virtual background can look magnificent on the monitor and fall apart the moment an actor walks into it. The architecture is detailed, the light is attractive, the perspective is technically correct. And still nothing settles. The actor seems to be standing in front of the world instead of inside it. When that happens, my first instinct is always to fix the background. Add detail. Raise the resolution. Adjust the colour. But the problem is usually somewhere else. The camera

Emptiness is usually treated as a mistake to be corrected. Move in. Reframe the actor. Fill the background. On a vertical screen, emptiness is hard to avoid — and I have come to think it is often the most expressive part of the image. Place a face in the lower half of the frame and a large area opens above it. A ceiling, a building, a tree, the sky, or nothing in particular. It still changes how we read the person below. A low ceiling presses down on a character. An open sky