The Movies
- Platform: PC
- Published by: Activision
- Developed by: Lionhead Studios
- Release Date: Nov 8, 2005
- Genre: Strategy
- Multiplayer: No
- Online: No
The Movies Interview Continued..
-- October 14, 2005 by: Chris Remo
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.
