The making of Kin, a No Man’s Sky cinematic short is a story of spontaneity and freedom. I had the idea to make a film after grinding out about eighty hours on No Man’s Sky, my homemade rig glowing deep into countless nights. Mining countless goodies. Constructing a few bases. Completing mission with friends. Then I discovered the camera mode.
As anybody who’s played the game knows, procedurally generated landscapes have probably never been more breathtakingly beautiful. Moving through the world is a sci-fi dream. There’s nothing I love more than sailing across star systems through rings of stardust. Landing on countless unique planets. Full of amazing flora and fauna. Covered in valleys and oceans. Dotted with indigenous relics. It’s epic – to say the least. It’s freeing.
Camera Mode in No Man’s Sky
I was thrilled to find the in-game camera to be quite comprehensive. I started off taking pictures of my home world. My base. My friend and I sitting by a fireplace.
With the in-game camera you can play with focal length, depth of field, cloud coverage (diffusion). Most importantly, you can customize light by controlling the position of the star(s) in your system. I was having a field day, tinkering with the various settings. Figuring it out.
It didn’t take long for the question to hit me. Can I make a film using these tools? Can I tell a story with this stellar game?
The problem: when you enter camera mode in No Man’s Sky, time stops. Everything freezes. I hit my first hurdle. How could I possibly make a film when everything is still? I could shoot it POV style, but shots won’t match if I can’t control light. I wasn’t willing to give up control of depth of field either. There had to be a way.
Trailblazing YouTuber EvilDr.Porkchop showed me the way. I owe a debt of gratitude to him. He put up a video which solved my freezing camera problem.
The only time you can gain control of the camera mode in No Man’s Sky without it freezing is by joining a lobby with a friend in multi-player mode. That friend must then be in the same star system as you. Then, and only then, will the world around you move while in camera mode. A too few many hoops to jump through to make a film, but that’s how it can be done.
I really didn’t want to inconvenience a friend. The film took over forty hours to film. I needed another solution. Then I remembered: I have No Man’s Sky on the Xbox, and the game is cross platform. I flipped on the Xbox and PC and joined myself with myself in the same lobby and star system. It worked!
Knocking Out the Script and Preparing to Film
Now that I knew what was possible, I got to work on a script. A new exciting tool was just added to my kit, and I had to write something that was just as thrilling.
I started writing about an astronaut in existential crisis – religious crisis to be exact. Perhaps the most tumultuous issue surrounding the possible existence of extraterrestrial life is the disproof of a god. At least one that made us in their image. A character who holds that belief deeply, whose job it is to disprove that world-view, created the perfect brew of internal conflict.
Then there was a journey to be had. The actual things this character has to face. Some of our greatest mythological quests are religious. I knew this, and I wanted to try and emulate what makes them so great. Making a film in No Man’s Sky immediately made it epic. My task was to touch on plot points that had impact.
To test the water, I kept it short. Five pages max. A religious astronaut. On a quest to find life elsewhere. To save the lives of his own people on a dying planet.
I felt what I finished was relevant, interesting, and touched on genre expectations nicely. I wrapped it in as much subtlety and as little dialogue as I could without sacrificing meaning.
Location Scouting, Set Building, and Finding a Ship
Much like a live action film, I had to location scout. I bounced around the galaxy, in search of the perfect system and the perfect alien planet. I had standards: It had to have rings. It had to be lush. It had to have life. It had to have hills, cliffs, and oceans.
After visiting over a dozen systems, I found one that fit the bill. The constant rain was an added benefit, manipulated to inspire hope or fear, depending on the light.
I got to work finding a good place to build a set on the alien planet. A sloping hill overlooking a valley worked nicely. I built a lean-to style set piece out of wood and snuck a fireplace inside one of the walls. I felt these details gave the newly built base a simple yet rugged look. Perfect for a solo explorer. Outside the shack I constructed some pieces from the vintage décor collection and the necessary base computer to play the astronaut’s communications computer, antenna, and dish.
Then I returned to my home planet. One that is covered in beautiful oceans, beaches, and grasslands. This would play the astronauts home planet. There I found a place reminiscent of Cape Canaveral, the site of Kennedy Space Center. A flatland made of sand and grass abutting the ocean. I built a launch complex made of metal on the strip of land. The buildings included a large platform, two observation decks, a rocket hangar, various antennae and dishes, and a launch pad.
To find a ship with the right look, I hung out on different space stations, waiting for NPCs to arrive. After buying three ships. I decided on the one in the film. I matched the astronauts suit to it. Green and white. It felt right. Green for life. White for salvation. The ship was perfect for an explorer. Small, agile, cool to look at. Official-looking.
Filming and Editing A No Man’s Sky Cinematic Short
Over the course of a week, in roughly 45-50 hours, I kept both the Xbox and PC running and filmed the movie. Even with a script in hand, the nature of the game prolonged my ability to get the shots I needed. With constant heat storms on the planet, it was tough to get many shots filmed at once.
It was an unruly amount of fun designing shots and camera moves on the fly. Experimenting with depth of field and light. The scenic beauty and variations in the land allowed for a feeling of freedom. The kind of freedom I never had and always wanted when making a movie.
The entire thing was a one big experiment. When I came upon the abandoned ship half sunken in the lake, my script was headed for the can. As I was filming, I was rewriting the story. Coming up with new dialogue. It worked. I dropped the religious aspect. I finally understood the value of flexibility.
There were a few shots that were painstaking. The dolly shots especially. I found it best to plug an Xbox controller into the PC to control the camera. That way I could achieve smoother, more natural shots. This was especially helpful when doing camera moves.
Before filming, I maxed out the game’s graphics. In order to actually capture footage, I used NVIDIA ShadowPlay. It was the quickest, highest quality solution available to me thanks to my graphics card. I opened ShadowPlay. Clicked the settings gear. Opened the video capture submenu and set custom settings. I recorded this project with a 2160p 4K resolution at 60fps with a bit rate of 50.
The large video files were worth it. The footage was stunning.
I got to work editing shot sequences together in Premiere. It may sound corny, but Walter Murch’s advice always echoes in the back of my head when editing. Pacing is about instinct. How does a shot’s length feel? How does a sequence cut together? As much as a single frame can throw it off. While my editing instincts are hardly refined, I cut out as much as I could to establish what felt like solid pacing. Always cutting on gut instinct.
VFX and Sound Design
Certain shots were not achievable in the game itself. Now that everything was moving in camera mode, it became impossible to get those ultra-wide shots out in space with the astronaut’s ship moving through them. To get the intended look: I took an in-game still of the ship. Positioned the capital ship and filmed the ultra-wide shots. Opened After Effects and composited the masked ship onto the ultra-wides, playing with movement by way of keyframes until it looked just right. Flipped on motion blur and crossed my fingers.
Recording dialogue was left to me, my bedroom, and an old Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. My first time doing voice-over. That was quite an afternoon. I was able to record all of the dialogue in the film. I was especially delighted to find I could edit the pitch of my voice for the commander at the start of the film and for the computer on the alien planet. A highpass and lowpass filter and distortions were applied to simulate the sound of a radio.
Sound design brought the entire thing to life. Thanks to some awesome contributors over at Freesound I was able to download a bunch of cool royalty-free foley. I set out to find lots of rain, a plane, wind, Katydids, and some funky animals that sounded alien. I found some great sounds for the wildlife on the alien planet. Among them: croaking geese, a grumbling alligator, buzzing bugs, a flighty elephant. I also needed sounds for the environment and it’s interaction with the human gear. This came down to rain on glass and metal for the ship and buildings. Footsteps through grass and on hollow metal. Wind in trees and grass as well gentle ocean waves lapping at the shores of the launch complex.
Original Music by Joshua Cirkus
Finally, when picture was locked, it was time to layer on the emotion with music. My friend Joshua Cirkus was apt to have a look at my creation and add his musical touch.
I created a short playlist of music and sent it to him. Over video chat, he sat at his piano, me at my edit, and we discussed what the film should feel like with music. Where it would make the film feel more fearful and quicker and where it would feel more hopeful yet ominous.
He experimented with various keys on the piano and then synthy sounds and pads in GarageBand to digitally record the score. I excitedly downloaded his score from my inbox and mixed it with the other sound design and dialogue in the film. It undoubtedly completes it.
Watch KIN, A No Man’s Sky Story
That’s how I made the film! With the gracious help of a friend for music, the many contributors of Freesounds, and Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky. It was a blast! If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out on YouTube or watch below, and let me know what you think in the comments. Help me decide if I should make another!
