The Movies Interview

The other day, I got the chance to sit down Brynley Gibson, Associate Producer on Lionhead Studios' highly anticipated upcoming tycoon/lifestyle/moviemaking game The Movies (PC). With only a few weeks to go before release, Lionhead is applying the finishing touches, so I took this opportunity to talk to Mr. Gibson about the game and its development.

Shack: The Movies has very much of a "tycoon" feel, which makes sense given Liohead's pedigree, but it's probably better known for its strong movie creation aspect. Do you see players who prefer one of those two elements being able to gravitate towards one at the exclusion of the other? Brynley Gibson: Yes. We wanted to create a game with those two elements you mentioned, but there's the whole creating a star and nurturing a star element too, those are really the three parts of the game. Shack: So, a little bit of The Sims in there too. Brynley Gibson: Welllll, we don't use that word. [laughs] Shack: Of course, of course. Brynley Gibson: A lifestyle game, we like to say. But certainly, yes, you could play the game that way. Let's say I'm into my tycoon game or I'm into my lifestyle game but I don't really care what's in my film. You need to make films to play the game, but it's possible to make films and not fiddle around with the moviemaking side of it at all. You can go in, you can hire scriptwriters to write scripts, the game generates scripts for you, you take that script, you chuck it into casting, you throw in a director and some actors, it would fill in the extras for you, it would fill in the crew, choose the equipment for you and you just say "shoot it." You don't even have to watch it, if you were that uninterested in it. So, yes, you can definitely play it like that. Now on the flip side, if I wasn't really too interested in how to play the game, I'm not really into tycoon games, but I did love the moviemaking aspect, I could go into sandbox mode, I could switch off certain elements of the game--the stars misbehaving, the build time to build a building, the decay of buildings. I could give myself any amount of money I wanted to have, and in that way I could go into a world, just put down the sets I wanted, get the stars I wanted, and just make films. Just play with the filmmaking side of it. Shack: From what I've seen the of the filmmaking tool, it's a very robust engine. What went into that aspect? Brynley Gibson: Well, it's a big part of the game, and a lot of development did go into making that part of the game. Firstly, we have the scenes that make up the films, and we went with quite a realistic animation style. It's much more realistic than the animation you'll see in the studio lot, which is much more stylized, a bit more over the top. We created a scripting tool which uses flow charts to build a scene, so rather than having to code scripting for it we use these flowcharts so it's a very quick and simple tool to build scenes quickly. As a result we have thousands upon thousands of scenes now across forty or so sets. Shack: And how does that work in terms of the player? Brynley Gibson: Well, there are two ways of making a film in the game. There's the simple method, which is that you take a script that's already there and you cast the actors in it, and you shoot it, and you can then click on each scene that's being shot and fiddle around with each scene. But the complicated way is the Advanced Movie Maker, the AMM, and this is something we went through many, many iterations of. It's one screen that has to allow the player to create a whole film, but it has to be very easy to use. So this is where you pick the scenes that you want, you cast the actors in each role that you want, you place props, you add lighting, you change weather effects. You can also go into each scene and there are sliders for each scene, and the sliders can change different aspects of that scene. So, for example, it could change the level of violence in each scene. It can change the way the scene is shot; do they shoot it very slowly or is it fast-edited? You can then go in and change the props that people use in their hands, so you can change a cigar to a cigarette, that kind of element. You can also pick technology types, so you can go in and have it use a dolly, so it would film it with moving dolly shots in just that scene. So you can really go and change around any element that you want. One thing that's kind of a late addition we've added is that the player can now turn off any role, from an extra to a main part in a scene. So I could have a scene where it's two guys talking, but there's a really nice extra role in the background of some guy smoking a cigarette or something. I think, "Well actually, I want my star to be in that," and I could just take that scene, turn off the main conversation, and just shoot the guy in the background, and just have that as my scene as kind of a moody atmospheric shot. We've also put something in to try and help out newbies to make a story, because narrative is--well, once you've been told the idea of the Hero's Journey, or any narrative theory, it suddenly can kind of ruin films in that way. We looked at a few different structuralist theories; Vladimir Propp was a chap who wrote some stuff, and a guy called Claude Levi-Strauss, these guys had various ideas of what makes a story. We looked at this stuff and thought, is there a way we can show players a trick to help them make a story? So we have added in this guideline; it's not really to do with the game at all, but it is there as a guideline to say, these are introduction scenes, you should probably start your film with some of these. Here's a confrontation, here's a resolution. That's at its most simple. You should be able to get a good strong narrative arc with smaller arcs going on underneath it. We're always trying to help the player to achieve that. Shack: Is that structural setup taken into account at all when it comes to the film reviews that are part of the game? Brynley Gibson: Well, the simulation uses a lot of different elements to rate your film. The structure of the film is not really a big part of it because we took a decision quite early on that when it cames to writing the simulation, we thought we shouldn't criticize people's artistic choices. We thought it would be devastating to players, and there's no way we can check how well the VO [voiceover] they recorded was acted or written, or how the subtitles were used. There's no way we can tell that. So we didn't want players to spend hours of their lives making these films--and it is, generally, brilliant film--just for the game to go, "Your film sucks. It's rubbish." So the simulation uses much more game world-y aspects. It uses the boredom factor of the genre, if people keep on churning out the same films; it checks the technology you're using, if it's fresh technology; the quality of your script, the quality of your stars, PR marketing, the happiness of your stars, what kind of mood they were in when they acted the film. These are all really tangible things that the player can see and do. We do have a review system for the films that you make, little clips from newspapers--kind of like the gossip pages. They're little cutouts, and we wanted them to have lots of content--take it or leave it--for the player, for those that need it to understand how to improve. So there was a question of how to tie that up into a way that people would find interesting, instead of just "plus two points" or whatever. So we wrote these review fragments that are quite amusing, and it's all part of trying to creat a real world. You're always in your studio, you never go outside your studio world. So we have these newspapers, we have the award studios, and that's really where you meet the rival studios in the game. Now, the artistic side, that's why we have the whole online part of the game, where you can go and upload your movies. That's where, if you've made these great films, your peers can look at that film and go "Yes, that is a great movie!" or "No, your film actually sucks," you know, that kind of thing. So it's quite different, quite separate. Shack: So there will be a rating system on the site for giving feedback? Brynley Gibson: Right, you can go on and each person has a virtual movie studio they get when they register and they get a free bit of space where they can upload films. Then people can go on and write comments and vote on your film. So if you win all the votes, you'll get an award in a monthly award ceremony. Shack: Like a film festival. Brynley Gibson: Yes, and then you'll get special downloadable content that you can use in your game. There's also downloadable content that you can buy just by being on the site, by being part of the community, by uploading films, rating films; you'll earn online dollars and you can download more sets and more scenes and more costumes. So you don't have to be the greatest filmmaker in the world to still get some of the extra content and keep adding to your films. We hope through this community--well, we've already got a lot of fansites that have sprung up. Lionhead has a pretty cool fan following, and there are already these movie studios out there that have set themselves up, saying "Right, well I'm a film studio, and these are my actors," and the game hasn't even come out. But with those guys along with our official site we hope to foster a real community where people will start trading user-made content, but also will start trading things like voice acting talent. So there might be a guy who has a great voice out there, but he's not great at making films. People would hear his voice online and say "I want you to act in my film." Or there might be somebody who's great at editing films, so somebody will send him his movie, saying "Please, could you edit my film for me?" Working together, to create better movies. So we think that by cooperation, and even just by seeing other people's films, the films are going to get better and better as they go along. Continue to the next page to read about voiceovers, star creation, and McCarthyist DJs. _PAGE_BREAK_ Shack: You mentioned voiceover. Is that done in-game, or is it postproduction? Brynley Gibson: Right. Well, it's inside the game, but it's a building you unlock to get the technology of postproduction. In there, you can edit the films, move things around, add your own sound effects or dub out sound effects already in there. You can use any of our music, we've got something like ninety pieces of music in there and all of them are originally composed for the game. We used the Prague Symphony Orchestra for the big movie orchestral pieces. The composer is great fun, he's an external composer called Daniel Pemberton, and he does a lot of TV music in the UK. He got to write different of movie music, throughout all the decades, going from plinky-plonky piano--he even owns this very old, I don't know, 1800s piano that he used. Shack: I heard that when I was playing, nice stuff. Brynley Gibson: Ah, so you made that first movie. We put a lot of effort into trying to get that first movie feeling right. It had to be silent, with sort of that crappy piano music, it had to look all grey and crinkly, but also good enough that a player would see it and say, "I'm quite proud of my first film, I'm looking forward to unlocking technology and moving on." Shack: So in terms of the postproduction-- Brynley Gibson: Ok, so for the postproduction, for that voiceover functionality, you record your voice and assign it to an actor. It will override the mouth expressions of the actor--not his facial expression overall, just the mouth movements--and it will lipsync. We generated our own lipsyncing technology that uses the phenomes in the voice, you know, "ah," "oh," it does all that automatically. It's pretty cool. So by using the star maker, where you can make anyone--I mean, you can make your friends and family--and that voiceover functionality, you can really create a virtual actor. Shack: Is the star maker mechanic also a technology to unlock? Brynley Gibson: No, it's an outside utility you run outside of The Movies. It comes with the game. Shack: So you just import those in. Brynley Gibson: Yeah, you import them in, it's very easy. You can also give them away to friends or trade them away to somebody. It's very easy to use and it's a very tiny, tiny file. Shack: You could almost have people cultivate an entire image. If you had a voice actor who had his own model, he could really star in movies all over the internet. It could be his likeness, and his voice, and he could have that reputation. Brynley Gibson: Well, you know, people often do have an online name and an online avatar, but here you have this whole persona. And absolutely, they could be in other people's films, which would be great. Going back to the whole community idea, that would be very cool. Shack: Aesthetically, all the music and sets and genres and so forth, all the design changes throughout the game to reflect the passing of time. Are there any business or gameplay aspects that change to reflect the shifting studio situation in Hollywood over the years, or is that basically irrelevant since the player is in control of everything anyway? Brynley Gibson: Well, there's the whole thing of how star contracts work. When the game kicks in in 1920, you already had a movie industry. In 1885, they were already making films, and then by the early 1900s you had long full-length pictures. So by 1920, that's really where the big studios had all the stars, and they said, "You just work for me, as an employee, and I'll put you in what films I choose, or don't choose." Early on, we did talk about whether we should have a changing system reflecting how the studio works, but we just decided no, for the purpose of the game, let's just keep it like that. It works well, and you hire and fire people as you like. We didn't simulate the model of how the economics of Hollywood have evolved over time. Shack: Are there any lesser-known elements of the game that people might not be aware of, but that you feel are noteworthy? Brynley Gibson: The radio is probably something we haven't talked about that much. We loved the music that has been written for this game. I think it's great, it's some of the best music I've ever heard in a game. We have real bands, real orchestras, it's not just whacking away at a synth. But we realized that most players aren't going to hear a lot of this music, and that's a shame. So we decided to have it kind of just playing in the lot. Then one of our music guys said we should turn it into a radio station, and we thought then we'd have to have DJs. So we created a few different characters, and these DJs kind of take you through time. Shack: That was great stuff at the beginning of the game in the '20s, with the old time fast-talking DJ. Brynley Gibson: Yeah, that kind of very nasal-speaking chap. And then in the 50s, you get this anti-Communist, McCarthyist type of commentator, and later on you get a more dry sardonic guy, and so on. It just changes through the eras, and it helps the feeling that, yes, you're in a real world, there's a bigger world outside the studio, and you're moving through time. But yeah, my favorite DJ is the first one, he's hysterical. That's probably one of the most subversive things in the game, the DJs--you maybe shouldn't write that. [laughs] Shack: You've got a bit of commentary in there. Brynley Gibson: Absolutely. And there are also news readers that pop up day to day that give you items of information that might be of interest to you, so there is that information in there as well. It's more for entertainment than anything else, just to make you smile when you're playing the game. Shack: When you reach the modern era, does the game just plateau? I would assume it doesn't go in the future. Brynley Gibson: No, it doesn't go into the future, it goes to 2005. Then you won't get any new world events, you won't get any new radio presenters. There may be some...things, maybe--perhaps--in the future future, but for now time really sort of stops there. But we haven't put a cap on it, so you can keep playing indefinitely. The point of the game is to get to the top of the charts, and you're constantly going up and down in the charts. You also try to win awards every five years, and you get special powers once you've won an award. It'll make your star easier to manage or something like that. But the way to win the game--and though it's a very sandbox-y game, you can win it--is by getting these special achievement awards. There are quite a few of these awards; they're really like goals, or challenges if you like. Things like getting a certain amount of money, releasing a certain quality of film, and having a number of stars, then you'll win one of those awards. By winning all of the special achievement awards, that will finish the game. It won't end the game, you can keep playing on and on. Shack: Effectively you'll have completed it. Brynley Gibson: Right, you can say "I've completed the game, I've gotten my special achievement awards, I've won it." We want people to hopefully achieve it within the time periods of the game, but we hope they keep going. That will actually appear on the online site as well, who's done it and who hasn't. Shack: How has development been shaping up? Brynley Gibson: Well we're in the final stage of the game now, and when we went on to balancing it we had a team that we split into designers and testers that were specifically there to test it in different ways. So we have some guy who'd try and play the game just like a twelve-year-old girl. It's hard to find those people. It's easy to find hardcore players who just want to go through the game, but I hope we have enough in there to accomodate all styles of play--well, I know we have now. So no matter who you are, you'll be able to pick up The Movies, go through the tutorials, and be able to play it because of the simple mechanics. You learn those and you'll be able to play the game. But for those hardcore players for whom the mechanics are easy, there really are so many items you can micromanage if you want to, that it should keep them busy. Shack: You've got that emergent level of depth. Brynley Gibson: Absolutely, yeah. So I think that will definitely come out as more and more people play it. I'm really, really happy with the way it's come together now. Shack: Just out of curiosity, how long has the game been in development? Brynley Gibson: Okay, it's not as long as people think. Normally, when Peter [Molyneux] comes up with a game design, he'll tell everyone about it straight away, he'll say "We've made this game!" and everyone thinks "Oh, it's done!" Of course, it's not done, there's just like two people going, "So, what platform are we going to make this game on?" and they're scratching their heads. So, really, it's been I think around four years--well, it's under four years. Three and three quarters. I was the first producer to join, and when I joined it was just a pre-production team. They had a couple of animators, a couple of programmers, a couple of gameplay programmers, a couple of designers, a couple of artists. Tiny team. By that point, it was already basically done, it's here, it's ready, but since then it's gone from that size of a team to about seventy or eighty, it's a huge team. People always have a go at Lionhead, saying it always takes so long, but it's not as long as people think. It's been under four years. Shack: That's not too bad for a game of this size. Brynley Gibson: No, I don't think it's too bad at all. As long as [censored] hadn't come out while we were still making it, you know. [laughs] Shack: Well, the game is looking really great! Thanks for your time, it was great speaking with you. Brynley Gibson: Thank you, I hope you enjoy it. Shack: Just out of curiosity, is that your DS? Brynley Gibson: Yeah, I've got Advance Wars in there now. [conversation derails] If you still want to read more about The Movies, I present this hands-on preview for your perusal. Lionhead Studios' The Movies will be released for PC on November 8, 2005. PS2, Xbox, and GameCube versions are set to follow at a later date.