The camera used for Avatar made its way onto the motion capture set of God of War. Not merely as a visual reference, but as a working tool: Sony Santa Monica Studio secured a unit and deployed it alongside the performers to craft scenes for the franchise's most recent mainline entries. This was revealed at View Conference in Turin by Bruno Velazquez, game director at the studio, during a session exploring the increasingly porous boundaries between video game production, visual effects, and animation.
The detail illustrates the extent to which the language of film directing has permeated the design of high-budget video games. In the case of God of War, the goal was to support the concept of a narrative presented as a single, unbroken sequence shot. To achieve a virtual camera that felt less rigid and closer to the physical presence of an operator, the team turned to techniques pioneered in cinema, including the technology developed for James Cameron's films.
It is not merely a matter of using actors, performance capture suits, and digital sets. The way a shot moves, tracks a character, or lingers on a detail is crafted using tools and sensibilities that, until a few years ago, remained more clearly divided between film sets and game development. Camera continuity in an interactive medium also becomes a production constraint: it must seamlessly integrate combat, exploration, and narrative transitions without letting players perceive traditional cuts.
Convergence stems from production, not just licensing
The Turin panel brought together professionals from across different industries: alongside Velazquez, Industrial Light & Magic animation director Hal Hickel, Guerrilla Games director Jan-Bart van Beek, Paramount VFX supervisor Tara DeMarco, Trent Claus from Lola Visual Effects, and Skydance Animation production designer Noelle Triaureau. Moderated by Wieke Schrakamp, the discussion focused on an industry shift that extends beyond the commercial success of video game adaptations.
Van Beek, whose studio is behind the Horizon series, noted how rendering, motion capture, and talent mobility have brought the two worlds much closer together. One of the clearest examples is virtual production with LED volumes: a technique that has become familiar to the general public thanks to contemporary live-action productions, but is rooted in game engines and workflows that also matured in gaming. Yet this crossover does not erase the core difference. A film directs the viewer's gaze and pacing; a game must anticipate the player choosing where to go, what to look at, and when to intervene.
It is an important distinction, including for those considering the numerous video game intellectual properties that have made the jump to cinema and streaming in recent years. Van Beek pointed to the examples of The Last of Us and Fallout as signs of the strength these universes have achieved in audiovisual media. However, he also reiterated how difficult it is to fully translate an experience built on audience agency: an adaptation can preserve the world, characters, and tone, while a crucial part of the original work—the player's autonomy—inevitably remains outside the frame.
The direction of travel also appears different compared to the 1990s, when movie tie-in video games were a frequent presence in the market. Today, the most visible shift is that of gaming IPs moving toward series and feature films. This does not mean cinema no longer influences games: rather, the account from Sony Santa Monica shows that the influence has shifted from simple licensing to the methods used to plan, shoot, and edit a digital scene.
Testing the player's gaze
Velazquez also described another aspect of God of War's production: the structured analysis of audience response during development. The studio organizes scheduled playtests, records facial expressions, and collects detailed questionnaires on story comprehension and difficulty levels. Among the tools used is eye tracking, which makes it possible to verify where participants focus their gaze at specific moments of the experience.
For a production based on such controlled direction, this type of observation helps determine whether visual and narrative cues are working. If a player misses a crucial element, or if their attention is drawn elsewhere, the issue may lie with shot composition, camera movement, scene contrast, or the way gameplay interrupts the narrative. It is a check reminiscent of reviews on editing and readability in a film sequence, but with an added variable: the viewer can deviate from the path envisioned by the creators.
This gathering of signals does not turn the game into a predetermined movie. On the contrary, it highlights the compromise developers must navigate: maintaining the impact of guided staging without excessively constraining player freedom. This is where the similarity between production departments meets its clearest limit. Technologies may overlap, as can many artistic skills, but interactivity also requires designing for the unexpected.
The Grogu case: tools do not replace performance
On the visual effects side, Hal Hickel steered the conversation toward the upcoming The Mandalorian & Grogu. The ILM animator explained that the choice between the physical Grogu puppet and digital intervention does not come down to an abstract preference for one technique over another. The criterion is the delivery of the performance: the character can remain practical when the result achieved on set is what was intended, while digital takes over when there is a need to intervene or complete the action.
It is a useful reminder at a stage when production innovations are often framed as straightforward replacements. Virtual cameras, motion capture, real-time engines, and digital creatures expand the possibilities for creative departments, but they do not automatically resolve directorial decisions. Hickel stressed that greater technical sophistication does not, on its own, guarantee a better performance. The choice of tool remains subordinate to what needs to appear on screen.
The same applies to the cross-pollination between cinema and video games that emerged at View Conference. For Sony Santa Monica, adopting a device linked to Avatar helped lend tangibility to the camera work in God of War; for Paramount, however, the relationship with gaming hinges on historical reconstruction. Tara DeMarco explained that the film Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, directed by Sian Heder and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, relies on video game historians and consultants to recreate the graphics and gameplay of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The team is preparing a guide addressing pixel art, resolutions, and the gameplay of that era. A seemingly technical choice, but a decisive one for an adaptation based on Gabrielle Zevin's novel, which focuses on video game developers. Indeed, applying modern tools to simulate the past indiscriminately would risk altering the identity of the games depicted. Fidelity, in this case, does not equate to photorealism: it requires an understanding of the hardware limitations, aesthetics, and design conventions that shaped a specific period of gaming culture.
The discussions in Turin thus reflect an industry where professional boundaries are blurring, even as each medium retains its own unique demands. Cinema lends video games camera techniques and performance direction; games provide the audiovisual sector with tools, expertise, and increasingly central narrative universes. The challenge for both is not to replicate the other medium, but to leverage this proximity without losing what makes the experience of a theater, a series, or holding a controller unique.
