Life force footage
-
Yep, entirely post production.
-
Not if it was post production.
-
This was mentioned in one of the letters provided by Ray Lockton, which seem to have gone missing from the website but I found it on an archived version:
"It cannot be displayed on the advisors' monitor but its correct status will be given to each team at the commencement of each chamber scene. During the scene any change of Life Force status will be clearly passed on as a warning by the Dungeon Master."
-
For some reason, I have a memory of being told whether our life force was red, amber, or green by a production assistant just as we were prepping to resume filming in a room.
But realistically, it was meaningless. If you needed food, it was there and you took it.
-
That's interesting.
It certainly added to the drama from the viewers point, and used as a way for the dungeon master to hurry the teams up by giving them a 'potential' threat.
I'm a bit surprised it wasn't shown to the team on a death, in particular the early ones where they got locked in a room or turning off the lamp and bascily died because it drained away.
I guess that's why by the end it was just a pie and served even less.
-
Even at the age of 12 I realised that the so called "life force warnings" were pretty meaningless. Perhaps if they'd have been a bit more careful with its usage, but when teams are constantly about 0.3 seconds away from it running out just as they're putting some food in their knapsack it starts to look a bit suspicious. Never was a team ever in danger of dying by their so-called life force running out.
And before anyone mentions a certain future team of Series 2 (not yet shown on the life force but easily look-upable on the site), I count that more as a forced lock-in rather than the life-force drain it claimed to be, including by someone who's put it on Wikipedia as apparently the only life force drain death of the entire series. I don't want to cause an argument so I've left it as is even though I don't agree with it.
-
Most of you will have seen this but seems worth mentioning that there are a couple of relevant sections in the Tim Child interview at http://www.bothersbar.co.uk/?page_id=193:
"The principle of the first life force clock was again borrowed from Atic Atac. There was no programming involved – it was just a linear cgi animation sequence. The Travelling Matte Company built it to my brief. It looked great but the trouble is it was always too short and there were not enough frames in it to slow it down and make it longer. It also didn’t edit too well for Life refresh purposes."
"Life Force is really what we call a hurry-up, but starvation makes for a rather boring death, so if a team were really slow, we’d summon up a monster and kill them with that instead. After all: they deserved to die, and we gave them an interesting death instead."
-
Because it's fake. It's not real and has no effect on gameplay. Given that one room might take one team 30 seconds to figure out and might take another team five minutes to complete, there wouldn't be any way to keep it consistent without killing every single team due to "life loss".
I understand it had originally been Tim Child's intention to have a proper life force clock that would act as a sort of measurement of "health" or "hit points" but it was too complicated, probably for the above reasons. Indeed, I do believe that there is one episode where a team is hit by the spectral scorpion and appears to take a hit to life force, but again, this was all post production.
-
Probably because they didn't track the animation against the quest in real time - it was only in the edit suite they decided what would be a suitable point of the animation to show. The technical limitations of the time perhaps meant it was never instantly 'good to go' at a specific point in the sequence.
I imagine...
-
Yes, Hobgoblin has phrased it better than I did.
If you show a team that they're on 50% health and they subsequently take 5 minutes to complete the room, by all accounts they're dead.
Certainly you'd run the risk of them panicking and rushing the room.
-
Well no, not at all. Because it wouldn't be left to just run it's course, you wouldn't click a start button and let it tick over.
The life force would be at whatever stage they needed it to be, which is exactly what happens now anyway.. but without showing the teams on their screen.
-
Though by showing the team the lifeforce the producers are committing to kill a dungeoneer in x minutes unless they get food.
Going back to Barry's winning quest - if the producers had shown a critical lifeforce status, estimating how long the team would need to guide Barry to the water drop, they probably would have died. By adding it in post production they can just make it look like a last second reprieve.
Some might say giving the team a finite amount of time would be a fairer way to play the game but it would have led to more boring lifeforce deaths.
-
True.
I do like the idea that it doesn't count down but take 'hits'
Like touching the skull or spikes, as well as other things that can drain your life force such as that symbol we saw a few weeks ago or some other nasty in a room.
Be interesting to see how the life force is use in the future.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login