Matt Workman’s Latest Project: A Cause for Excitement

Imagine being able to pre-visualize your camera and lighting setups as easily and enjoyably as playing a video game. Well, that’s exactly what cinematographer Matt Workman is working towards with his latest project, Cinegame. Workman has already made a name for himself with his fantastic resources and lessons available through Cinematography Database, including the subscription-based pre-visualization plugin, Cine Designer. However, Cine Designer requires knowledge of Cinema 4D, which can be daunting for some. That’s where Cinegame comes in.

Cinegame is a new approach to pre-viz that Workman is building inside of Unreal Engine 4. With a system built in Unreal Engine, you can get really realistic lighting, shadows, and depth of field. Notably, it’s all real-time. This sort of resource has never been available before, and it’s a completely genius idea.

In Cinegame, you control a virtual easy-rig donning camera man (who can shoot with a handheld look if needed). You can use him to quickly run around and jump and crouch and find your perfect angles. Workman’s even added a Small HD reference monitor in-game and mentioned the possible use of LUTs inside of the virtual monitor.

So far, there are a lot of really exciting features built into what he’s doing. Workman has added a storyboard workflow that allows you to take screenshots of your monitor view and build your sequences sequentially and provides image files from within the game. It appears that the controls for setting your angles are very intuitive, and that you’ll be able to set your angles very quickly.

The in-game camera has real-time depth-of-field that is also responsive to the iris of the camera as well. So, if you stop down on your virtual lens, you’ll have a narrower depth of field in real-time. It also looks like you can virtually pull focus and create rack focus shots in the game as well.

The prospect of what this would make available to filmmakers is pretty exciting. If Workman is able to create a platform for storyboarding and practicing your craft, and make it as fun and easy as this appears, it will be a game-changer for the industry.