Blog Post 4: Analyzing 'The Last of Us' 's "Truck Ambush" Cinematic Cutscene

I decided to analyze a scene from one of my favorite video games, The Last of Us, a game by Naughty Dog about a Texan survivor in Apocalyptic U.S. 20 years in trying to get a young girl to a resistance group cross country. I chose a scene that didn't contain any big spoilers to the main plot, since they have already shown the latter part of the scene in the game's trailer.

To summarize the scene, this scene is after Joel (Our Texan Protagonist) and Ellie (The teenager) obtain a car in Lincoln, Massachusetts from a contact of Joel's named Bill (and this scene is after they dealt with a whole hoarde of zombie like people). They are on their way to Pittsburgh, and the scene is mostly focused on a portion of the car ride to their destination. Cut to daylight, Joel and Ellie arrive at a crowded yet deserted highway. So he changes route. They come in contact with a "wounded man". But Joel knows "He ain't even hurt.". It turns out to be an ambush, and the scene ends with Joel crashing the car into a garage.

This is definitely one of my favorite scenes (that are non spoilerish) from the game. It gives an overall feel for the game that is intense, emotional and story driven. Naughty Dog is well known for making cinematic games and succeeded with the style of movement, cuts and composition.

There is a guitar piece from 0:53 to 1:23 was a great add-in. It ended the scene connected to saying goodbye to Bill to the point where Ellie spoke in the car, and shows that they had been driving for a little while. It's a good transition to have. It's the only obvious non-diagetic music piece in this scene. The rest is diagetic, thanks to Ellie stealing one of Bill's old tape cassettes, that played Hank William's songs. And the song that starts is "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" (which is fitting for a world filled with hunters and fungus infected killers). Despite the title and lyrics of the song, the song does match the scene where Ellie and Joel are bonding because of the 'happy' tone of the music. It's showing a lighter side of the apocalypse when things are calm. I like that they show that they have the tape running, because from the edit from night to day (or at least cloudy to sunny), they're playing a different song by Williams called, "Forsaken and Alone", another fitting song for the feel of the movie. This song has a deeper tone than the first one played, and helps lead the story into a more intense scene, which is into the ambush. The song goes from diagetic to being non-diagetic as well, because the song becomes louder and doesn't have that radio static anymore. It sounds clearer.

The scene is very cinematic, and involves a lot of camera movement. Composition-wise, many of the scenes follow the rule of thirds (having characters at the 'money' spots). For example, 0:00-0:04 (Bill and Joel in the back of the truck), 1:13-1:18 (Joel's car driving by), and that's just naming two. tracking and panning is also very successful. They're not too long, they're not too flat, and it's a video game so it's hard to show a realistic on hands camera tracking, such as several of the interactions between Ellie and Joel in the car and when the hunters start their ambush. A very good one I noticed is when Ellie gives Joel the tape. The camera keeps their track on Joel and follows his hand putting the tape into the tape deck. It's funny how, grabbing from the mood of the music, how the 'happier' song plays during a scene that is raining and toned down colors, while the more deeper and tense song plays during the bright daylight, switching how we usually feel about what those opposite color tones in a scene do. What determines how long shots are really depends.mostly it shows either a track or change in camera angle to change focus on characters. I think the longest shot was the part where Joel decides to turn around the car (3:20-3:32) so around 12-13 seconds, and that part used a tracking between characters as well as the change in foreground focus and background focus and then back.

I believe the cuts are very seamless. At the part where it is dark and raining, and Ellie says,"I'm not even tired." in response to Joel telling her to get some rest, and then 3 seconds later, it smoothly cuts to daylight and Ellie is shown to have been sleeping. You didn't need another scene in between, or a cross dissolve transition. It was a seamless cut because of the same framing of the character's placements. Still, there was also something about the cut between cgi cutscenes and gameplay that I always had an issue with. You can't see it here, but the scene starts from a cut that went to a blackscreen , and ends cutting a to black screen for maybe a millisecond or a second and then it moves on to gameplay. It is very hard to do a very great 'jump-into-gameplay' cut if the level of graphics for the cinematic cutscenes is different from the gameplay graphics. So in the future I hope they find a better way to deal with that.

As I said before, Naughty Dog is well known for making their games feel like a realistic cinematic experience, and watching this game does make you feel like you are watching a movie. It successfully shows realistic camerawork using tracking and panning. The editing and cuts is very smooth. They give both the dark and light atmosphere in terms of lighting and mood. And the scene shows enough content to get a feel of the world without spoiling the game. It shows that music is as important as the visual of the scene. It makes you feel like anything can happen. You could be in a down time moment driving and trying to stop the teenage girl you are looking after from looking at pornographic material to dealing with hunters in an ambush. It goes from relaxed to very tense. Shows also that this world has cut back on technology, and how much of a struggle people are facing with supplies and also the change in people's nature. It's enough to get this game a 10/10 score on many different gaming review sites and a nomination for Game of the Year 2013.

Hey guys! This is an interview that I did with one of my classmates. She talks of one of her favorite hobbies. Check it out :)