We've been left waiting another six months after the GTA VI release date was pushed back from May to 19 November. In the meantime, the legacy of the franchise was apparent at the Cannes Film Festival, which saw the premiere of a movie inspired by the graphics of 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
Le Vertige (or Vertiginous) is a 67-minute comedy about a man who seeks to prove that reality is a computer-generated simulation. Appropriately for that premise, the film has a crude low-poly 3D style inspired by Rockstar's classic PlayStation 2 game, and it was made using the free animation software Blender.
Le Vertige was directed by the French filmmaker and music producer Quentin Dupieux, AKA Mr. Oizo. It stars the actors Alain Chabat, Jonathan Cohen and Anaïs Demoustier, while the art and animation was handled by a team of just five recent animation graduates from Gobelins in Paris. They used an iPhone app for motion capture and the free 3D software Blender for animation, proving that AI isn't the only way to make a movie with a small team on a low budget.
Quentin says the art style was directly inspired by GTA: Vice City. In an interview also conducted in a low-poly visuals (see below!), he says the reason was that he didn't want to deal with the complexity of today's animated blockbusters, which he says "are becoming increasingly elaborate". He wanted to invent "something consistent with my way of working."
The director said he asked the team to place as many cameras as possible, given that adding cameras doesn't add to the costs in Blender. Thus entire scenes were animated and rendered from every camera angle, creating a vast number of sequences to choose from.
Apparently, the actors, who are well-established names France, didn't know what the final visual style was going to look like. They recorded their lines in a studio without any visual references.
The animation in the trailer does indeed look very true to PS2 graphics. The use of Sims-like characters wearing the actors' faces showing limited expressions and awkward movement seems to fit well with the protagonist's belief that reality is a simulation. The limitations of the art style and the strange glitches typical of retro games become intentional devices, contributing to the comedy.
Unlike the AI movie that was shown in Cannes not at Cannes, Le Vertige was part of the film festival's Directors' Fortnight, a section for independent film. It will be released in cinemas in France on 10 June.
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