The Game of the Scene - GAME NIGHT
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The Game of the Scene - GAME NIGHT
A sense of play!
Directing team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein bring a great sense of play to their work. This is dramatised rather literally in this delightful sequence in Game Night (2018) — which we name check in our latest Draft Zero episode on “The Game of the Scene” (#shamelessplug).
It’s a masterclass of some really clever filmmaking techniques.
“A high-stakes game of hot potato”.
This great little sequence is written in the script as:
The centrepiece of the sequence is a oner. The sense of space and time that it gives makes the thing feel both more game-like and more intense.
But the visual language of the oner is artfully set up by this 90° tilt up that recalls the David Fincher of Panic Room and Fight Club. We’re being shown that the camera will not be coupled to the characters. It has its own perspective: knowing just where to be.
You can see the same idea in this “breakaway” moment: we leave the character we’re following to find one of the Bad Guys. It creates a moment of suspense — “oh no, she’s going to get caught” — but then surprise! she enters frame and turns on her heels.
The oner itself is stitched together from multiple sub shots. Some of it shot on a gimbal:
And some of it shot on a cable-camera:
Each sub-shot is (I reckon) built around the appropriate bit of grip kit for getting the camera move they wanted. The end effect is that the changing of the type of camera movement makes the whole sequence really dynamic and kinetic.
Eagle-eyed readers may notice that in the first GIF that Ryan (Billy Magnussen) is holding a physical Fabergé egg. While in the second GIF, Max (Jason Bateman) is catching… well… nothing.
CGI eggs would explain the perfect passes between the characters. Not having to take perfect catches on camera would make it much faster to shoot.
You can see the CGI egg bounce around in Jason Bateman’s hands. But who cares? It happens so quick and is quickly obscured by the door.
Jason continues to obscures his hands from the camera - so we can’t see what, if anything, he’s holding - until he ends up falling over and letting it go…
And we don’t even see him let go of the egg in shot! (Kind of a reverse Texas switch?)
Presumably because the rolling egg is CGI (so they can choreograph it to perfection) and those kinds of interactions between CGI objects and live-action human hands are tough: you’ll end up doing CGI hands too. And, understandably, people tend to be a lot more sensitive to the realism of human digi-doubles than to digi-double Fabergé eggs.
The “layout” of this sub shot (the choreography of the animation and camerawork) feels grounded because the framing isn’t quite perfect. As if the cam operator can’t quite predict where the egg where will be.
Compare it to this iconic shot from Fincher’s Panic Room where the CGI mobile phone stops perfectly in frame. It feels more artificial, even if there’s a subtle tilt mid-shot.
If you rewatch the whole “hot potato” sequence again, notice how the filmmakers been very careful to hide the moment of transition from a CGI egg to a physical egg and vice versa. They’re kind of modern variations of classic Texas switches
.We don’t see eggs being thrown in frame, we only see them being caught — and then, not always. It’s much easier to fake catching a non-existent egg than throwing it.
It’s own kind of fun game to try and work out where these texas switches and shot stitches are. Its very clever stuff!
John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein build on these ideas in the “doric chase” in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) which we will look at soon!