This is the story of Horizon Zero Dawn, the hit 2017 PlayStation 4 exclusive game, edited into a movie. This video has been optimized for viewing on an HDR display, using an HDR capable youtube player.

I've been looking forward to making this game into a movie for a long time. I'm glad the community waited until now to vote for this game as my next video game movie, because now I have the ability to capture in 4K and HDR, and dear god this game deserves that treatment! This is one of the few pieces of HDR content out there I know of that actually makes use of the full 10,000 nit range in HDR. In fact, 20% of the screencaps I took during making this movie measured in at the full 10,000 nit range! This means that while the game looks great on modern TVs, it's actually future proof to look even better when brighter TVs come out in the future!

If some of you are unfamiliar of the work I do, I try my best to translate the story of video games into a movie experience that anybody can enjoy, whether they play video games or not. Because of that goal, I work as hard as I can to try to cut down gameplay to the minimum you need to understand the story without causing plot holes, and remove as many of the "game indicators" on screen. In the case of this game, that comes in the form of notifications for new locations and levels, as well as the tools panel which appears in the corner during combat sections. Thankfully, the game has given me the ability to disable everything else on screen, which I absolutely made use of. Of course this did make some things, such as aiming or navigating more difficult, but I always made sure to watch walkthroughs before playing the game to at least be familiar with the layout of the levels, and tried my best to align the center of my screen with the object I was aiming (in the future I may attach something to my screen to help with this)

In order to remove those gameplay indicators, I used a combination of editing, cropping, and visual effects. Thankfully, this game made it so there weren't a huge number of VFX needed, only about 45 shots in the whole movie, totalling about 3000 frames. This was much better than some of my projects, which required hundreds of VFX shots, but the movie was still a long one to create. While I try to trim down the gameplay wherever possible to focus on the story as possible, this is still a pretty long game. On my first playthrough, I was 65 hours into it before I finished the story! Of course, there is a lot of exploration and side content that fills that, but it's still a fairly large story, hence the 6 hour run time here. Considering I have also begun manually transcribing the subtitles of all of my movies, that's obvious also a lot of work when the movie is that long. Here are good recommended stopping points if the length is too much for you:

0:00:00 - Introduction
0:26:21 - The Proving
1:06:19 - Leaving the Embrace
1:42:33 - Meridian
2:50:13 - The Metal World
3:56:07 - Zero Dawn
4:57:31 - The Final Battle
6:00:06 - Epilogue

These will appear as chapters in the video timeline above.

If you like what I do and would like to see more, make sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified when I upload a new video. Subscribing to Youtube Premium also helps all the creators you watch a lot. If you'd like to support me further, I also have a Patreon page here:

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On there, every supporter gains access to a production update blog post I update pretty much every day I work on a movie, giving behind the scenes information about what I've been doing, where I am in the project, where I would estimate the release date might be, etc. For those who wish to support at higher tiers, I also provide access to full quality downloads in both SDR and HDR, and even access to early unfinished cuts of my movies!

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