Rocky Mountain News: 'Adaptations' the latest thing, and actors are getting in on the gameMarch 26, 2004
Pierce Brosnan had no complaints about his death.
He didn't mind bullets punching holes through his body, the abrupt end to a skyscraper plummet or even being blasted to bits by a rocket-propelled grenade.
He asked the executive producer of 007: Everything or Nothing for just one thing: He wanted to die with dignity - not falling lifelessly to the ground like a rag doll or in a panic, arms flailing.
It may have been Electronic Arts' video game, but it was Brosnan's body, so the gaming company listened.
The video-game and movie industries' tenuous yet passionate courtship has sparked a revolution in gaming: actors' starring in games that have never been and never will be movies.
The result is something that transcends the limitations of passive movie-watching and the mindless button-mashing of plotless interactive gameplay. And with this revolution has come a torrent of movie stars with a love of the game and a need for creative control.
"The visual presentation is huge for the actors," said Scott Bandy, senior producer of Everything or Nothing. "It's their voice, but it's not their face."
To put the stars of his game at ease, Bandy spent time with them during production, even sitting down with Brosnan and showing him all the ways he was going to die while in the hands of a gamer.
"We actually took small (movies) of him dying," Bandy said. "We told him: 'This is what it looks like when you fall. This is what it looks like when you get hit by a (rocket-propelled grenade).' "
Brosnan, who lent his likeness and his voice to the game, helped Bandy fine-tune Bond's reactions and movements.
Bandy also had MGM and Danjaq, owners of the Bond license, to contend with.
Bond's death "is always an issue with Danjaq and MGM," Bandy said, because in the movies Bond never dies. "But they realized that a certain amount of (death) has to occur. In our world, a player must have a failure state."
So Bandy made sure not to glorify Bond's death. In Everything or Nothing, the spy's spy never goes out with a bang.
"We always try to make Bond's death not glorious or exciting," Bandy said. "We try to make it pedestrian."
When Jet Li got involved in the game Rise to Honor, he didn't just provide his character's voice and looks - he wrote the fight scenes and helped create the game's combat system.
"When a guy comes at Jet Li in a film, Li doesn't face him - he takes the guy on without even turning," said Jim Wallace, the game's producer. "We wanted to get that across in the game."
So the fight system in Rise to Honor is one that allows players to take on the bad guys without having to move around much. A player just smacks the joystick in the direction of an enemy, and Li's character does the rest.
To create the cinematic attacks and combinations that breathe life into the game, Li called in his longtime fight choreographer, Corey Yuen.
"We had a system for combos and blocking, but it was Jet along with Corey Yuen that crafted pretty much every fight move the game has," Wallace said.
The team divided the 360 degrees that surround a player into six zones and filmed 13 moves in each zone through motion capture.
"He set a Sony motion-capture record for moves captured in one day," Wallace said. "It was, like, 270 moves."
Not quite a movie
When Bandy talks about Everything or Nothing, he tends to call it a movie despite the fact that it isn't even based on one.
It's an honest mistake. After all, the game stars the voices of Brosnan, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench and John Cleese. It took a crew of more than 100 two years to shoot, and it cost more than Bandy wants to talk about.
It just so happens that this latest Bond experience is on the small screen - and that small screen is attached to a video-game console.
"The biggest difference really is the length," Bandy said. "Our productions are not two to 2 ½ hours of entertainment. In Everything or Nothing, we are talking 25 to 30 hours of gameplay."
There are also a lot of similarities between the people behind the cameras and the people behind the computers, said Neil Young, executive producer of the Lord of the Rings video-game trilogy.
"The game industry is in the process of changing. As our medium matures, it's going from feeling like it's a hobbyist thing, to a toy thing, to where it is now, where it's a legitimate art form," he said.
That legitimacy and advanced technology have paved the way for a new level of collaboration between the two industries.
"The technology enables actors to give the caliber of performance they want to give," Young said.
In Everything or Nothing, the actors had 360-degree cyber-scans done of their faces. Those digital models were then molded to look nearly photo-realistic. Finally, artists fine-tuned the digital actors' grimaces and face movements with hand-drawn animation.
The game also relied on an elaborate system of digital cameras and lighting rigs that re-created the process of making a film, allowing the non-interactive cut scenes amid chunks of gameplay to be shot on digital sets.
"Everything was storyboarded," Bandy said. "Every dolly, every zoom, every camera move was scripted."
And though the digital world allows for impossible camera angles, some of the rules from the world of film still apply.
"There is no reason to do (impossible camera angles) gratuitously," Bandy said. "We use it sparingly because the audience will find it jarring. . . . It's not what they expect."
The final product was something that gave actors the ability to practice their craft and movie studios a little something to worry about. Studio heads don't want games that will steal their movies' thunder.
When Bandy was doing the casting for his Bond game, he had to make sure not to involve anyone who might show up in a future Bond movie.
"If MGM or Danjaq would have said, 'That's someone we had in our short list for our next film,' then we couldn't use them," Bandy said.
The opposite was true with Brosnan, who had to play James Bond if Bond were going to appear in the game.
"I think Hollywood has turned the corner on their thinking, and you will see more and more eagerness on these productions," Bandy said.
No apologies for adaptations
Movies are either original works or adaptations of books, and now games follow a similar pattern.
"What we are really doing is adaptations," Young said of his Lord of the Rings games. "We were trying to adapt Peter Jackson's work for our medium in the same way he adapted J.R.R. Tolkien's work."
"Game-makers are starting to feel that they shouldn't be apologetic about adapting a film."
To do that, a game must have not only the actors, crew and director but someone to write a plot that works in a medium that doesn't always follow the same path.
While movies are typically built around a singular plotline and narrative thread, one of the key concepts of a good game is allowing players to have control. The more that game designers constrict that freedom, the less fun a game can become.
Making a successful game movie means finding the right balance between player freedom and an interesting plot.
"People expect a story," Bandy said. "The key for the next generation of interactive titles is the folks who can solve that problem."
Everything or Nothing may have found the right approach.
"I'm not sure I need to tell you a story page by page or shot by shot as long as I can tell you one chapter by chapter," he said. "When I play (Everything or Nothing), Chapter 4 may only be 15 pages for me, but when you play it, it might be 150."
It was up to Bruce Feirstein, who wrote the movies Golden Eye, Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough, to put that concept into the original screenplay he wrote for Everything or Nothing.
"In a movie, you worry about how to keep an audience involved for 90 minutes," he said. "(It takes) a whole other skill set to keep a player involved for hours or days."
Feirstein decided to take on the task because he was intrigued by the merging of the two industries.
"I wanted to learn about this medium, and I really do believe this is an important new medium," he said. "You look and you see that television ratings are down among men and women and people are buying less music and the box office is down. There are only so may hours in a day, and those hours are going to games."
Young says the legitimization of gaming, the ability to create an interactive game that can both entertain and affect a player, is the wave of the future.
"Electronic Arts was sort of founded on the question 'Can a computer game make you cry?' " Young said. "I think we are getting closer to that moment."
