"The vehicles for emotion are actors. So you need to provide the technology to create virtual actors, to deliver emotion." |
No. Every single technology throughout the game comes from game design. We designed the goal and then we identified the technology necessary to reach the goal. It has never been the technology driving what we were doing. It is like if you were a writer and you would say, "I have got a fantastic pen! Let's write something with it because it is so cool to write something with this pen." Who gives a shit? I don't care! That is not the way to do it!
You need to have a real story that you need to tell and then you find any pen. Maybe you will find the best pen that works for you. And that is fine. But that is not the way to work. I guess it must look weird from the outside, for you guys, to see how we came from Indigo, to The Casting, to The Taxidermist, to this scene today for Heavy Rain. But when you look at it there is a real logical progression to this.
I mean we really learned. With Indigo we learned and we prototyped technology for The Casting because we thought emotion was very important in story telling. And the vehicles for emotion are actors. So you need to provide the technology to create virtual actors, to deliver emotion.
So we used that in The Casting with some success. It worked in certain aspects, with some failures. It did not fully work. And then we came with The Taxidermist where everything became interactive and you can actually really play, and it was telling a story that was a little bit more complex and different than The Casting. And then to Heavy Rain. So there is a progression, but it is always driven by design.
Was there ever a point that you told the artists, "Well the characters maybe look a little too real or they look unusual now that they are a little too real. We need to make them look a little more like stylized?" I mean, they still look like people, but...
No, actually, because the idea behind Heavy Rain was really to recreate virtual actors. So it made our life very difficult at the beginning of the development because we spent about a year to find the right guys, the right actors, for the roles. It was not like picking one face, and one voice, and one actor for the body motion capture. We needed to have one consistent person. That is exactly like an actor for a real movie.
So that was really difficult. It was a nightmare. So this is really something that we discovered doing it. We spent a year doing casting sessions in the UK, the US, and France. We ended up with four actors where we said, "Here they are. These are really the characters." It was really funny, because when I look at the scene, I was of course in the studio with the actors and I really recognize them. I recognized the way they move, the way they talk, and the way they move their face. It is really them.
So I would say with The Casting we maybe had 50% of the performance of the actors. I would say here we are probably closer to 70 percent, maybe 80 percent. There's still room for progression, but we're getting really close.
Are these known actors or just people that you guys found?
They are professional actors but they are not known so far. But I hope they will get to be known now with the game. You know the problem with Hollywood ... we considered at some point working with famous actors, but the idea was to have someone famous for a week, give them a million dollars, and get what you could get. But that was not the way that we wanted to go with this.
Collaboration with the actors was a year of work, with the four main characters. A year working on a very regular basis to shoot motion capture, to shoot facial, to do the voices, and to do all these things. So they were really immersed in the story and they really had a real understanding about what we were trying to achieve and what the story is about. This is something you wouldn't get from anyone in Hollywood. So I guess we needed a different kind of partnership with the actors, a different type of cooperation.
"I am dreaming of the day where game creators will have to think about the story they want to tell and the emotion they want to trigger instead of what technology they are going to use." |
Yeah. Of course it is a possibility. Honestly I have never reasoned Heavy Rain, thinking of a movie, and saying, "Oh it has to be a movie. That is my dream." It is not my dream. I am happy if there is a movie, but really the experience I wanted to create was a game. I don't know. It may be an interesting movie. I think it would be a different kind of movie because of the four characters and the way their stories are interlaced. It is going to be something different, but it has to be done right. There is no way we are just going to sell the license to someone and say do whatever you want. Do a shooter movie, do an action movie. Do whatever you want. It would have to be something that would really be faithful to the original idea.
Speaking about a game that takes 8-10 hours, what sort of game play mechanic is there to save your game? Do you have to interact with something or can you drop out at any moment and save the game?
That is something you don't need to care about. We really tried to work with the interface and the game mechanics behind to be totally invisible to the player. You don't need to care. At some point I want you to forget that this is a game. Just follow the story and get immersed in the emotional experience.
At any point did you look at this and say, "Oh this works really well as a serialized story that might be downloadable?"
Yes. We won't do it with Heavy Rain. But what we have developed with Heavy Rain is an interface that will allow you to tell any kind of story. So we could tell a dark thriller like Heavy Rain, but we could tell a drama. We could tell a comedy. We could do anything because all the interface is very simple, and accessible, and contextual. So you could do pretty much anything. That is something that is interesting.
The actor game engine.
Maybe.
Or Shakespeare's game engine.
I am dreaming of the day where game creators will have to think about the story they want to tell and the emotion they want to trigger instead of what technology they are going to use and how it is going to fit into the interface. That will be an interesting moment.
Cool. Well, thank you for your time!
Thank you very much.
