An 'IMMORTALITY' Project: Creating the Ultimate Interactive Movie

[Music] I am going to tell you all about our project immortality um this was already going to be a loose and ramshackle presentation um and then the organizer of this of this conference decided to schedule my talk first thing in the morning the day after the awards show so uh I'm going to try and get through it and uh we'll pull together um I want to get to like a nice substantial Q&A so I'm going to try and Pa through it apologies anyone that has to try and keep up with me uh so let's go I was start my timer so I'm um so I'm s Balo I'm a game director designer writer um I founded this company half mer made Productions uh to go and make interesting narrative games uh why are

we called half mermaid uh it's a fun story uh when we started my last project telling lies uh we had to set up a entity to go make things and do all the legal stuff and the lawyer rang me up and was like oh we need a name for your company it has to be unique and interesting and on the spread of the moment uh I thought of this dream project that I had um which was an idea for a movie about Alfred Hitchcock uh working with Esther Williams if you don't know who Esther Williams is uh this is Esther Williams uh she was at the height of her Fame probably the most famous film star at the time and she was known for making movies in which she would swim uh she kind of invented uh like the Olympic sport of synchronized swimming and she would do these elaborate musical spectacles involving swimming and like her story was fascinating because she had aspirations to be uh more significant as

an actress to take on work that didn't just involve swimming and so the idea for this movie was you'd kind of have Alfred Hitchcock at the end of his career and he's kind of fading and he comes together with Esther and they both want to make something special and the focus of this movie would be Hitchcock wanting to shoot the most elaborate drowning sequence that ever been conceived and so the name of this movie was drowning a mermaid which was nicely kind of ironic so that became the name of the company and then when we started immortality and we decided we were going to self-publish we realized that without the context I've just given you drowning a mermaid sounded kind of aggressive and scary as a company name so we kind of morphed it into half mermaid acknowledging that all of us at least from the top up are half a mermaid um and uh this is significant because that dream project I had this idea of exploring this combination of of director and actress and the the creative tensions um essentially uh

found a new form in uh ultimately uh the project immortality which if you haven't played immortality I am probably going to spoil everything um so you have know like three minutes if you can download it on your phones uh before it's all going to be ruin for you uh immortality is a video game about exploring footage from three lost movies and answering initially the question what happened to Marissa Marcel the star of these three movies it was the first indie game ever to get a perfect score of 10 in Edge magazine and uh last night we won two Awards so we clearly did something right and if you follow all the steps I lay out here you can recreate that success it's very reproducible

these you know this is a a template you can just apply to your own projects um so I'm going to zoom back out and I'm going to kind of start from the the higher level philosophies and goals that drive what we're doing and hopefully if we have time I'll get to the spreadsheets which I know is the thing that everyone is here to hear about so like what is there a driving Mission behind what we're doing at half mermaid and and kind of what is my mission in games in general and for me it's kind of crystallized especially over the last few games to be about storytelling and the form of Storytelling and for me if I look back at the 20th century um which you know I was born in the 20th century as my kids remind me I was born in the late 20th century which makes me sound like an antique um the 20th century as as a period of Storytelling for me is defined by broadcast right this is the big Game

Changer uh you've gone from traditional storytelling techniques kind of oral storytelling inperson theatrical storytelling and you have the popularity of radio that then blossoms into kind of network TV and Cinema where a Storyteller can create a a beautiful piece of Storytelling and then share it with a huge audience right and and that audience can then absorb and react and there is a sense of kind of global community around it but it's it's it's so powerful and like my go-to this is like the best fact ever um my go-to kind of example of like how powerful this moment was in this transformation to broadcast was uh in the 50s auson Wells did a live TV version of King leer um when this version of King Leo was broadcast more people watched the live TV version of King leer than had ever watched any

performance of King Le in the entire history of humanity prior to that day so you get this sense of like the seismic shift from like how stories were told and distributed and the scale at which they operated once we hit broadcast you know the the the scal is of SC um and that is is such an interesting and powerful thing so now that we're in the 21st century what is my sense of like what is going to define the forms of Storytelling that we create and for me it's all tied up in like digital right what does it mean to tell stories through digital media what does that enable and for me the initial beautiful first step is is what I call throwing away the container so if you look at take movies as an example the the structure of a movie the fact that it's like 90 minutes to two hours roughly um the ACT structure is very specific like the container of movies exists for very

practical purposes right if you want to distribute a movie you need to print it on film put it in a can at least you used to drive it to the movie theater play it if you're broadcasting a television show naturally you have a single static version of the show that then gets blatted out to everybody and again there are restrictions there right the 30 minute show or the 45 minute show act structures based around commercial braks these very specific containers that you know exist for very practical reasons if I'm watching a movie there is a limitation to the human bladder uh the movie theaters want to schedule multiple movies throughout the day for commercial reasons so we have all these kind of restrictions that come with this kind of 20th century version of broadcast but now that we're digital uh we can throw those away entirely right and I think up until now the disruptive kind of digital storytelling media has tweaked the container right Netflix might say oh we can have a 35 36 37 minute episode or

maybe stranger things can be two and a half hours long or an hour long is it a movie is it TV but these are all like very subtle shifts they're still writing these pieces of television in the same structure with the same container with the same uh usage of plot as this kind of guiding principle so for me the real opportunity that we have and coming from games is to throw these containers away and what happens then what do you do in the absence of the container and for me if you look at the core pillars of what video games do best and can do best um these are the means by which we can navigate this much more open interesting space for storytelling uh so here are my four pillars um in the background there that's the the pillars of nosgoth which is a little bit of foreshadowing if you take note um and the four pillars for me are challenge right uh as human beings if you put an obstacle in my path if you give me a riddle or question I'm naturally

inclined to want to overcome that obstacle to Solve the Riddle to to answer the questions so challenge is this really interesting driver when you give people agency and control in a piece of Storytelling that's going to really drag them in and give them that sense of immersion expression is I think like my favorite uh when I think of expression I think of uh like an intendo and I think of playing Mario uh which is a game in which Nintendo say here is this game about running and jumping but the mechanics of that game give you a richness and a fluidity to allow you to express yourself through how you run and jump right any two people playing Mario are going to navigate differently there's like a real kind of nice possibility space within that mechanic and I think what differentiates my games often with some other narrative games is is really paying attention to how can the play Express themselves through how they interact with this story and finding mechanics and structures which open up to that

expressivity uh the third pillar exploration is obviously like a fundamental feature of a lot of video games um you know as a kind of hunter gatherer species we are predisposed to dig exploration right being led by a sense of Curiosity Discovery these are kind of key fundamental aspects to a lot of traditional video games and I think again what I've been doing is trying to take a lot of those verbs around exploration and apply them directly to the story itself um and that's been kind of a fascinating Journey um and then the fourth pillar uh is the one that kind of we sometimes take for granted video games are very good at simulating things uh can simulate physics and vehicles and bullets and have ai that has like you know an abstracted simulation of of some kind of creature and so we kind of lean on that a lot because it's very interesting as a human to interact with a simulation and try and kind of grock the rules of the simulation

what I found over the years working in games was that as a Storyteller I would lean on the simulation as a prop like it would give me free immersion it would involve players but I I kind of questioned how useful it was for my specifically my storytelling and so starting with her story in 2015 I kind of explicitly gave myself the challenge of make a video game with no simulation uh no State changes no tracking of of of kind of structure can I still create an experience which is enjoyable and immersive so given this kind of approach uh the last few games I've made I set out so with her story I was exploring a lot of these ideas for the first time the idea was to deconstruct a detective story take a a type of story that the audience is familiar with knows all the tropes take that knowledge and then use that to to kind of fuel the experience by breaking it down into Atomic elements letting people freely

navigate they could themselves kind of rebuild and reconstruct the idea of a detective story I followed this up with telling lies and like the use of video in her story was somewhat instinctive like there wasn't a lot of conscious thinking about why I did that um but looking back with telling lies I started to think about what was interesting about this technique of using video and the kind of stated mission of telling lies was to make an anti- movie was like all the things which make this distinct from the traditional forms of movies the structure of it the pacing of it the way we shoot it we're kind of driving the idea of telling lies and so both of these kind of culminate in immortality where we kind of then Revisited a cinematic aesthetic and said well what happens if we deconstruct movies themselves right if we start to break apart how movies work why movies work how they're made and kind of really dig into that and it unlocked some extremely

ambitious and challenging questions so it's s like a kind of fun thing to do so also driving this uh I have like my pillars of what is a video game right and as I'm working on a game I'll keep returning to those right is this expressive enough is there a meaningful challenge uh you know how does the exploration work are we empowering the player with our exploration but the the kind of other method I have which is sort of fundamental to my process is I have these three aspects of the game and the logic is if I have all three of these in place this is going to be a good game and if I don't have a clear idea of all three of these do not start making game like this is kind of the the the early kind of Sanity check of is there an actual solid core here and as well it like helps with when the game finished is it going to be sellable is it going

to be explainable is this something I can market like the whole kind of concept gets tied up here so the method is to come up with uh a theme right so the theme is what is the question that we're exploring here and it might be a question I don't have an answer to um in fact those are the best types so for example her story the theme there was kind of identity our external and internal identities and the extent which they're shaped by the environment that was like you know conscious brain what are we actually grappling with in this story and then there's the emotion and and this is kind of key to me is as a Storyteller I want to have uh a really specific emotion that I felt that I want to communicate and it to communicate that needs an experience right if I was to just put it into words it would sound trite or unspe specific so like how do

we create an experience and and through living that experience have the player feel this emotion so for example in telling lies the emotion was how does it feel to have been in a relationship that's failed but still hold in your head the memories of the happy memories of when that relationship was working right and it's a very complicated part of being a human is is holding these conflicting emotions and still having the spark and the way that memory works like there was this real gnarly little emotion there and it was like how do we get people to experience that and and think about it because if I express it like I just did it's kind of lame and then uh a key thing is the metaphor I call it I think I'm slightly breaking the use of the word metaphor the idea here is what is what is the metaphor and and kind of it becomes the mechanic that describes the G game and this becomes a really useful

communication tool to the player so for example with her story the metaphor was that moment in a police show where the detective is sat at the computer and they've run out of leads they're at theend you know it's they run out of leads they're at the end of their tether and they sit it's 3:00 a.m. and they're just going through the police database looking for that one little clue that'll break the case wide open or in an older movie it be like a micro feature they're just going through old newspapers until they see something and that was like oh that's that's the core mechanic of her story and that is this metaphor so then if you build the game around that when you then show players the game they get it because they recognize this thing and and you know the question is is this a useful metaphor for the story we're telling like is this going to be something that you can wrap these themes and emotions in and so yeah the process is to really use this as just like a way of of analyzing a piece of game design

and going do I have these three things and you know maybe it's easier to do this in the Indie space but also like throw out the crap that is extraneous to this right if you can kind of focus on these three things that gives you a tight and cohesive piece of game so doing this process on immortality our theme which was uh absurdly ambitious uh was why do human beings tell stories and you know we like if we're going to do something that's about Cinema and looking back at the 20th century and and Cinema as the great storytelling form of the 20th century this is a a you know an opportunity to ask these very deep questions um and it was exciting to give myself permission to ask something as ambitious and silly as this because because sometimes you try and kind of scope things down and you feel like oh this is uh like overreaching or it could end up awkward if we try not these big questions um and

you know with this project it really became tied up in like to what extent is our mortality part of this uh you know oftentimes you look at people creating pieces of art creating stories and sometimes the objective is to use it as an immortality project to create something that will live beyond them right and is that a useful and healthy thing to do so this was like the theme that we set out to explore the emotion um was again it always sounds trite when you try and express it but uh struggling with the impossibility of creating the perfect story uh and it was like if if storytelling is something we're driven to do if there are kind of Primal reasons for it the most interesting way to explore that is a case of failure right so uh this fell here is from the cancelled Legacy of cane game that I spent three years of my life working on um was the most challenging thing I worked

on and and the biggest failure probably of my career and uh that had like I after that I went and did some stuff and I did her story so it slowly been kind of repressed and buried all my feelings of this project and as we started to build this one I'm like oh this is all this is all about that Legacy a game because you know there's such a a commonality between movies and games in terms of the number of people people you need the expense the technology right these are very challenging places to try and tell a story and tell a true and pure story because there's just so much going on so you know I I really wanted to try and tap into how that felt why did I work so hard why did I push myself so hard at the expense of my family and the rest of my life to try and make this Legacy of cane game which was a constant struggle um and how did it feel when it failed and you know trying to put that into experience for you all to

enjoy uh then the metaphor uh became the moviola um this was like the very first design dock for the project uh was this little picture of Pikachu with moviola um it's a slightly mixed metaphor it's we can kind of expand it and say it's uh the moviola of the editing Suite right that the metaphor became imagine you're in an editing room uh and you have all this footage right that process where uh making a movie the editor sits down to do the assembly cut and they have everything that's been filmed this this vast amount of footage and they start organizing it and obsessing over it and looking it and picking out the good takes and going frame by frame and just really immersing themselves in the the beauty of the film and slowly they assemble the movie and so that kind of was our sort of guiding principle um and the mechanics of that and and kind of wanting to explore the the tactile nature of film as a medium versus the kind of more digital stuff we're familiar with um but even at this

point presence of Pikachu shows that we were aware that we were also making um Pokemon Snap essentially and and this was another way that I Justified like this Project's going to work because like we're doing some weird stuff and we have these ideas but like I've played Pokemon Snap and that was fun and people liked Pokemon Snap so this is going to work so then the next thing that we do and this is been a huge difference for me going from like the AAA space or the bigger project space to being an indie and being able to kind of Define how projects work um and it is specifity and to be honest like all I ask of a game these days is to have some specifity like I want some real crunchy little special unique details I want to feel like I'm engaging with something that's very authentic and specific like I know

I just recently finished playing pentant right and I was like oh this is some like this is like a deep deep dive into a particular fetish for this period of like history like I'm I'm feeling enriched by interacting with this it doesn't feel a mish mash of generic stuff um and the 100% reliable recipe I have for imbuing a game with speci civity is research um so on this project we spent a year year and a half of a two and a half year project was researching and outlining and writing and thinking about this stuff um and I have like another cheesy tool that I call the list which is you know I will basically go and read everything on a subject just read hundreds of books watch as much footage read academic papers just everything I can get my hands on and as I'm going if I find a really interesting little detail um I'll add it to a list and at

the end of this process I just have this really long list just full of these little textures or details or moments that I've never seen before that feel fresh and it's kind of this little toolkit that I have as we then start to actually assemble the story and the process and the mechanics of like oh there's that little thing I've been looking for a way to use that and insert that um but yeah the research reading is so easy now to just go online and convinc yourself that you've researched something but if you sit down and read like three different autobiographies of someone you just get like a volume of genuine like human detail that's interesting so to give you an idea we're going to watch a bunch of videos now oh actually I'm going to inro you first so we started thinking about this idea of of exploring movie making um answering these questions trying to explore this idea of failure and the struggle um so so for me like I have a particular love and interest in the idea

of lost movies uh so here we got a shot from a movie that awesome Wells he shot like half of called The Deep which was an adaptation of the book Dead Calm which is one of my favorite Thriller novels um he never completed it he ran out of money in fact awesome Wells ran out of money a lot uh later in his career like he probably has the record for the greatest number of lost movies um and and it's like this this perfect encapsulation of what we're talking about because if the purpose of art is to create an immortality project uh a lost movie is a failure right you put all this effort in and it never comes out uh it's it's this radical example of failure but it still lives right I get excited thinking about this movie that never happened and I see a couple of frames from it and a few clips from it and that's so evocative and interesting and my brain starts working and thinking about it so it's also got like this Nuance to it um and then similarly like there are movies that have come out so like uh Eyes Wide

Shut was something of a kind of North Star for this project um that is uh I mean kurick in general has all this you know there's so many conspiracy theories and there's just so much interesting stuff that people dig into with his movies but Eyes Wide Shut is is fascinating so kubri spent his entire career trying to make this movie uh from the very beginning he was constantly trying to adapt this book that it was based on um at various points they almost made it with Woody Allen as the star which is an alternate path that we have luckily kind of diers from there was a version of Steve Martin he had John lcar write a treatment um he just kept trying to figure out how to make this movie and it ended up being his last movie right and he literally died before finishing this movie in fact this movie killed him um so when kubic died the version of eyes wi chut that's out there was not a finished edit it was like you know 90% And kubri was also famous for continuing to edit the movie

even after it had premiered um and it's it's this idea of struggle and failure as well like this at the time was the longest ever movie shoot there was all this kind of intrigue and interest around what was going on why this movie was running for so long what was happening with Tom and Nicole uh and and fascinating things like Harvey Kel and Jennifer Jason Lee were in this movie shot out 90% of their scenes and then when it ran for so long they had to recast them and reshoot it all so it's even a movie that came out is full of all these what ifs some potential versions that could have existed um you know so the idea that the the kind of finished ultimate version like is that the perfect version that kubri spent his whole life trying to make um you know and all those kind of unlived possibilities are kind of fascinating so this was you know we started to kind of hone in on this and this idea well how about we make our subject lost movies right the idea that we're exploring and and kind of

unearthing and bringing back to life these lost movies felt like a really nice way to explore our themes um and then we we kind of quickly in just reading a lot of the history of movie making kind of realized that like the the most extreme and intense character to explore the sacrifices and struggles and challenges of trying to express yourself and tell stories would be the ACT right when you read about what goes on in the making of a movie and the history of making of movies and the power structures this was like the absolute Locust of like all of these forces uh so for example uh the person on the left there is Margarita Canino um and on the right is the person she became uh the the movie studios picked her and decided to transform her uh she underwent painful plastic surgery and this was like old school plastic surgery um they changed her ethnic they changed her name uh they kind of essentially rebuilt her from the ground

up and uh she was their creation right under the studio system they owned her Rita Hayworth was this new entity they had created so it's like this real Apex of like that sacrifice of self to essentially allow yourself to re rebuilt um in in service of the storytelling but at the same time there was this Nuance as well of like thinking now from from the 21st century like Rita Hayworth has survived there is something of her soul that when we watch her movies lives beyond the screen and we don't talk about the studio heads who created her right and and all the other people that were part of all these different Power Systems and all these mechanisms like there's something where she has kind of survived and she does still live on through this footage of her and so this idea of like a star this idea of of an actress who's brought in

and kind of molded felt like a really useful kind of locus as our main character to explore some of these themes I also started to get really into hair realized that hair was super important in our story um so here on the right this is Rita haywith in the lady from Shanghai um a film that she filmed with awesome Wells who at that point was her ex so like all of those complexities and different power dynamics were extremely complicated in this movie and ausome Wells decided that for this movie she should cut her signature hair and dye it blonde and Harry con who was the studio head when he had heard of this was absolutely Furious he was like we created Rita Hayworth the hair is like 50% of who Rita hay with is and so you had these two guys one was the guy who created her and owned her the other was her ex who was also her director both arguing about what she should be doing

with her hair and it's like that's kind of screwed up um and the hair continues right so um we started to get really interested in Jane Fonder as well because she occupied this this beautiful moment where film changed right went from the studio system into kind of new Hollywood and tracking her career she was an actress who was able to actually assert herself and gain some agency and start taking on roles and sort of transform what she was doing and with her hair uh so in barberella a film in which she was directed by her then lover rer viim uh and Roger viim would uh take these actresses that he was in relationships with and create movies and kind of he was in love with the fantasy of them that he created on the camera and he was extremely controlling and so for him the idea of the beautiful blonde uh woman was like his his archetype and

at a point in her life where Jane Fonda was discovering feminism and was trying to assert herself and Chang her career she went out got a hairdresser and they cut the hair went back to a natural color and the what became known as the Clute haircut was born so there's a lot there's so much hair hair trivia that we were just like oh this is like such a big deal and it's so kind of interesting the the Nuance that it brings um here we got some videos uh so we were watching like so much video I became obsessed with uh talk shows right I watched like a 100 hours of Dick Cavit which is I recommend it um and there's something really interesting about these actresses coming out being interviewed so they're playing a version of themselves and uh it was at points excruciating because uh all of the sexism and the power dynamics uh uh fully on display and a lot of this stuff so this was this is from like I guess the the 80s is Phoebe Kates with lamman

um I have a particular particular love of uh grungy video so Clips like this are my just I love this look at this this is beautiful um this constant obsession with the age of actresses and their youth and their perfection and and how mold controllable for being here this uh quite an honor I guess huh yeah it's a real honor yeah you look very young in person yeah everybody says that yeah he looked like a I don't know 15 16 maybe well yeah maybe yeah and can we tell folks how the rest of the interview gets worse um he was okay what we got next okay so this this was another clip that kind of was had pride of place on our mood board so this is Olivia Olivia hussy with her co-star in the Romeo Juliet movie uh the end of the 60s they were both like 15 16

when they filmed this uh this movie and they're being interviewed by uh a very kind of BBC is uh British interviewer um and there's this small little clip here which YouTube loves like the YouTube commenters love this this stuff because it's all about smoking personal question Olivia um I notic you know you're at 15 that's pretty young to be smoking cigarettes isn't it when did you start about 14 about 14 while you were doing the prime of Miss Jean broy yes well just before then actually um I mean that that is pretty young there aren't many girls at 15 I know that smoke cigarettes publicly there are and uh what do you uh yeah she spends like the whole interview smoking like a chimney um but that little beat like the whole interview this BBC guy is is treating her like some slightly exotic precocious creature and he's very intrigued by by uh you know her her strength of character or whatever um but the look

she gave him and she was like you don't know about teenage girls what they're up to that like I that start with me and I started watching a lot of these uh Clips a lot of it was like kind of a fantasy wish fulfillment thing of like wouldn't it be great if like as a as an exaggeration and reflection of actually how much strength of character these actresses have to sit there and just kind of smile through this crap um if actually inside of them there was something even more powerful uh that could just step up and rip the head off this interviewer or you know had a lived experience or a wisdom that was far in excess of what you're thinking um and that kind of grew into the fantasy element of this game um okay next put tooo much video in this okay so then

um another character that I kind of became obsessed with um and interestingly paralleled the story of of Jane Fonder and where Jane Fonder was able to actually kind of emerge and gain control uh Jean seberg we see here did not um she was uh an actress who was kind of cast from obscurity by Otto preminger uh into a movie where he literally burned alive um on set and and was a big failure she had this incredible moment where she essentially ushered in the New Wave by starring in godard's breathless but subsequent to that uh her career didn't work uh she was constantly trying to seek out meaningful work uh and and the system the men around her consistently failed her and then she kind of died tragically um so kind of getting really deep into her story became like a big part of the thought process trying to create this character of Marissa Marcel uh this clip

here is the first time she appeared on television ever um this is like a deep archival thing so the quality is amazingly bad it's beautiful like the the generation loss is is exquisite but check out some of the body language in here it's actually uh kind of excruciating exact moment you know here are the two principles in the most exciting Adventure in Show Business in the last 25 years the gentleman here probably recognize him the distinguished producer and director from Hollywood a preminger so let's have a nice question now before I introduce this youngster I want to tell you the story that auto preminger conceived and carried out he is for he has the rights to Shaw St Jan for the movie he thought to himself that wearing of the star system temporarily that this time he was going to find a girl and unknown and so he scouted through all of the United States and then in most of the countries

of Europe and in Canada in out of probably 18,000 girls I believe submitted their applications and their backgrounds and then utto reduced this to 3,000 he tested all of those and this youngster here Jean seaberg is the one who caught lightning in a bottle because of her talent and her beauty and the qualities that AO is looking for so let's have a wonderful hand for this 17year old young exact moment uh and then we talked about Jane fer already um we really kind of zoomed in on this moment in her life when she had this reinvention and she was living in 70s New York um hanging out with Warhol herself was doing some very interesting Explorations warh studio called the factory is on Square we called there no result he was at a farewell party for Jane Fonda on the SS

France we're doing a picture together Cy darling well we're calling you blond and a bum trip Jane Fonder is going to be in warhol's next movie at least she thought so Warhol did not I hope um so you know building up all this research like we we we then kind of zoomed on in this idea well the most extreme version of the idea of this Lost movie of this struggle and this creative struggle would be somebody who uh has filmed several movies but all of them are lost right this idea of this actress who films three movies and none of them have survived so it's like the ultimate kind of version of this idea and we started trying to respond responding to all this research kind of orchestrate and and pick where we put these in the

history of film so we had uh our first movie at the tail end of the studio system this idea of a director who is uh out of fashion a kind of late period Hitchcock style director um who you know it's coming from the studio system where everything is fake and owned and uh you know it's things that would have felt extremely cinematic and exciting early in their career now feel more dated and Theatrical then we contrast that with this jump to the new Hollywood in the early '70s particularly in New York where film making becomes more organic and authentic we have this idea of like 70s film making being this kind of ideal of like grownup Cinema um and we wanted to kind of interrogate that and then for our final movie we give ourselves a little interesting time Jump and we're at the end of the Millennium where everyone's kind of looking back you have the invention and explosion of the Indie movie it's all these young people who are looking back back at the 70s and being like this was the good and we're going to try and replicate that um

and it was kind of the last harah before everything became digital so this gave us like this interesting Arc to explore right and have this character live through these different moments and we were able to to figure out different aspect ratios so we'd have this kind of nice uh explorability of of seeing footage from these different areas and being able to recognize where we were um okay I'm going to get to the mechanics I'm going to have to go far otherwise we won't get to the spreadsheets um so while we're doing all this research and outlining and thinking we're also in parallel like prototyping the mechanics uh so we kind of have the time to let those bed in and get the right game feel so the moviola uh I talked about you know this idea of putting you in the editing room and we wanted to hit something uh you know I pitched someone early on about this and they were like so is it like Final Cut are you like gamifying Final Cut it was like well no CU that's like the prosaic bit what we want more is like you're in the editing Suite with the editor right you're looking over their shoulder and

you're reaching into this bin and pulling out footage and putting it in the machine and then discovering what's on it right we wanted to give you that that the excitement of that and the tactile nature of that without a lot of the praic stuff so the moviola became this Focus uh we had like 15 hours of recordings of moviola sounds that we started trying to kind of uh use and and concatenate and then uh there was this piece of research that I just kept going back to and this was uh Nick Rogue uh when he so the film director Nick Rogue when he started out he was like a te- boy at one of the studios and he talks about and and this part of his biography he talks about the moment where he first saw uh this was an edola which is the same thing as a moviola um first time he saw footage running and he could turn it backwards and he could play with the speed of it and he was just like mind blown like this was magical to him that he could manipulate time uh and it fundamentally changed his understanding of film making storytelling

um and in the same in the same biography he then goes on to say so the edola was like a PlayStation 3 for me so he was writing this a few years back um and just like you read that when you're doing your research and you're like holy like he's he's telling us what to do right oh we're going to take the PlayStation 5 and make it into a mova we're going to flip that equation um but he understood that was something like playful and and kind of tactile and exploratory about that experience for him um this is I put this clip in as an Indulgence but I don't know if I can I I'll indulge myself uh so this you see this in his work uh in the film walk about he uses um the manipulation of the footage to express some subjectivity so in this movie some evil Hunters shoot this Buffalo we see the Buffalo die uh um and then Rogue starts screwing around

uh to try and express something so he does this Zoom right into the grain of the footage right the breaking it down into its kind of atomic elements and then Along Comes this kid who by the way is Nick rogue's son movie making is always incestuous and complicated um Along Comes this this young boy and he's so uh kind of traumatized by seeing this Buffalo die we have these freeze frames where like time stands still um then he looks over and cuz he's willing the Buffalo to not be dead we then see from his perspective the footage of the buffalo in Reverse coming back to life again uh this was like an obsession of Nick Rogues and and we really dug into that as well this idea that playing the footage back Wass was a way of resurrecting something of bringing something back to life and um if you you have played immortality you might see some moments

or scenes in this where the idea of playing things backwards as a way of resurrecting the idea that the existence of this footage and your manipulation of it is a way of bringing someone back to life is is kind of a big core beat of of that story uh and as a side note uh using your marketing to foreshadow your big story beats and the endings of your stories is awesome and you should Do It um so we just yeah every time we talked about immortality our early teaser trailers we put out these images of this fire in these flaming posters so even before people were playing the game we were preparing them and helping them build up the richness of where we were going in our story um I think Penman did that as well did Penman um a quick note as well watching that thing with the zoom into the Grain and stuff um I promised Conor our program that we would tell you how great this was uh we had like all these discussions around

film grain like film grain is so iconic and useful and we knew we going to be zooming into the image and exposing the grain um but we also knew that like when you compress video grain does not work uh and looks gross um and we had lots of kind of soul searching discussions with our Director of Photography about how we would do this could we shoot on film should we not are we going to shoot on digital how are we going to recreate the grain um and we suggested well why don't we do it in game we have a game engine they were terrified like it might look like crap and you know a lot of film grain in video games doesn't look very authentic uh so we set out to do the best film grain um and uh we came up with a system so the way film grain works is there's two grains uh when you first capture the image on the negative uh there is an initial grain that's created by the little imperfections and holes between the actual kind of uh material of of the film and then when you take that negative and print it and invert the image you create a second grain so there is grain in the light and dark of the image has different

properties uh depending on Luminosity so we had a system whereby uh the the shaders would look at the Luminosity of the image and then apply these different grains uh in varying amounts we had these fun little curves that we could set up in unity for the different film each each different type of film we had scans of actual film grain that we turned into tileable textures and then we could apply and tweak the way the Luminosity gradients worked so that we were applying the Grain and you'll notice like where you hit the really hot burnout whites there is no grain right a lot of of of kind of film grain shaders will just sort of multiply and you'll see the dots everywhere um so this we just kept tweaking and going back and forth on uh to try and hit that authenticity and give us that beautiful kind of crisp grain when we were zooming in and out so it didn't feel like a kind of compressed digital version of this you know this analog film that we were trying to celebrate uh so we continued to to kind of prototype and work on things and so

we spent a year tweaking the feel of scrubbing the film um and we had this pedotype build we had shot anything we had a bunch of clips of different films and this was from uh the Eyes of Laura Mars uh a scene in which um Tommy Lee Jones does take his shirt off and like rewinding and and and tweaking film is so much fun right me and Chris Nolan and tenant are like on the same wavelength of like play people take clothes off you play that backwards it looks amazing people shake their hair play it backwards see water smoke all these kind of things they just look beautiful when you start messing around with them so this was one of the scenes that I would just test and test and test and we tried so many different things of like how are you scrubbing the film we started with this idea of like a moviola is quite mechanical but we ended up kind of mixing our metaphor a little bit cuz we wanted it to have like a real tactile feel so we're like well Imagining the film reels if you're touching the real and you can kind of move it but then you can spin it and it'll have some inertia

to it so we came up with these ideas of like flicking and what does it feel like to flick an analog stick then we realized you lose control so we started like ratcheting it and locking you into certain speeds and there was like yeah it was like a Year's worth of just like screwing around uh with the footage playback um and as you can see there I'm now technically married to Tommy Lee Jones um he's a lovely he's a lovely partner uh and then we got into the grid right this was exciting for me like in the previous games uh we'd always do a trailer and to show in the trailer just how much cool footage we had and the range and variety we'd always end up on this visual of like a video wall like whoa look at all the cool stuff here uh and on this one I was like what couldn't that just be the game right wouldn't that be exciting uh I was also like my teenage years were spent going to video installations in art galleries I was obsessed with those things so just like big screens and and walls of video is an aesthetic that I really appreciate um and this is how we ended up with kind of our core interface of

this grid that you can zoom in and out of and Shuffle um and and the excitement for me here was uh this idea of the map is the territory right as it's like a borus short story about the idea of a map that is actually to scale um and and that's video games right like we navigate these Virtual Worlds that that have essentially an extent that is is huge um and here this idea of an interface that does all these things I'm listing here like it's it's essentially your menu it's your inventory of Clips you've collected it also serves as a kind of History because we have this symbol grid that every time you click on something we're capturing that image and the grid shows the place you parked the footage at as well so it's becomes very personal and specific to you um so the idea that it was doing all these things and we wanted as well like you never leave this screen really you zoom into the footage

and then you'll zoom out of the footage and you can teleport between bits of footage but like you're essentially in this consistent world right again it's like an abstraction of the edit room you're surrounded by all the footage and we just allowing you to feel overwhelmed by how much is there and it also recalls like if you're a hardcore copile you're going to you know there's sites that do like a frame from every minute of like your favorite movie and you can see how the color schemes shift across the movie and stuff and it's like a really fun way to just kind of X-ray a movie um a lot of this game was like what do all the cool I do as a copile how how can we just trick the player into doing that without realizing it right because they just think it's a game mechanic um the one thing we did we were trying to be so authentic in everything we did the one thing and we we were so like torn about this because uh the aspect ratio of most gaming things is is landscape uh to sort all the these clips uh it made sense that the film strip would be on its side

that movie film however is vertical right so technically if this was real footage the strips and the little holes would run vertically down we did briefly try that and it just didn't work aesthetically so we were like well we know that we're breaking a rule here and that this is not real but it's going to help everything in the long run so we felt bad about it but we pushed forward um and then uh the core kind of Marquee mechanic of this video game uh the match cut um see if we got time this is oh this is such a good match cut uh this is from peeping Tom a movie about people dying on camera um and what that means uh oh look at that match cut um again we like you know the match cut is something people are going to be able to Gro it's this thing they will understand it's exciting and fun could that be the mechanic at the heart of our game um cuz we had been discussing like how do we we make a mechanic out of cutting in film right how do we not have it be

praic like Final Cut like how do you have that be interesting and expressive and so we had this idea of like what if I could click on anything in any frame and have that then cut to something else like that's so expressive you can click on anything you're deciding what's interesting what's aesthetically interesting um and then we get really interested in this idea of well to preserve like the magic of the cut you don't know where it's going to go like the game is going to decide where this cut takes you um and that was fascinating to me because it was introducing Randomness into a pure narrative game and we know that Randomness Works in like Diablo loot drops all these other game mechanics um but usually in narrative you're looking for like this causality and this very simple kind of causality and logic to it so I was like oh this feels interesting right it's a big risk but let's explore what it feels like to have Randomness in a story mechanic um and it felt like teleportation I'm like obsessed with the idea of teleportation like so many games are about moving fast having superpowers right and this idea of teleporting around a narrative feels like a a superpower um I'm going to skip

showing you the video because you know how it works um so how did we do it and this was like the big challenge um I'm gon to go really fast now sorry uh and and I love uh in game sometimes the solution is just to do a huge amount of work and that's what we did we said well is it possible to actually just track every single thing that we think is worth clicking on uh and it was uh we would we had a team of people in After Effects uh myself and Natalie would mark up these are all the things that are in Focus that should be clickable um and then we had a team of people you know using tracking technology to track all these objects we then had the complexity of having to compress that information which was you know gigabytes per scene and in like VFX software uh into these kind of simpler lower polygon animations so that every single object is constantly being tracked there were rules for how things overlapped and things that were interesting um and then we had this big

lookup table that would tell the code there is an equivalence right an apple and an orange could cut together uh Marissa Marcel playing Franny can cut to Marissa Marcel playing Maria um and and there is like a a ranking to it um which I'll get to in one second but also we we kind of did a lot of iteration on well how do you click we had a version where you you could just click at any point and it would do the match cut and we were like it doesn't feel sex enough so then we were like well let's make it a modee let's have to enter the mode and then it becomes like bit like Pokémon Snap or like sniperscope in an FPS so we added this Barrel Distortion um and a bit of a vignette so that as you're pointing and choosing what to click on it it's like taking a headshot in an FPS um made it feel more magical and more special uh and then we have this algorithm and this is how the game decides how to make a cut and it's twofold there's a kind of pre-calculated aesthetic where it decides what would be a good cut and it looks at every single frame and decides these are good frames to cut into based

on like permanence on screen size on screen motion all sorts of factors then at real time it looks at we have all this information about thematically what's happening in scenes what various elements mean uh and it tries to choose a good point to jump to and um uh maybe in the Q&A or outside we can talk more about the specifics of that um but it it tries to do clever things and it has this kind of heartbeat so it'll alternate between trying to connect things that are in proximity and then it'll be like now now it's time to like jump you super far in the story it has an awareness of spookiness so if you haven't seen anything spooky for a while if you're like oh maybe we should kind of come over here so it's like a lot of fuzzy logic so there's there's like a lot of uh of of logic to it but it's not exposed to the player it's it's kind of doing this meaningful little dance it's like playing a kind of two-player party game right uh you you play consequences and I draw a funny little picture and for it to be fun you have to meaningfully respond to what I've done

but I also want you to surprise me so this was kind of this interesting balance um and then we have secrets in the game there are some big secrets we wanted this thing to feel alive and feel haunted um so we uh we talked about awesome Wells again about the War of the Worlds um how he took radio something people were so familiar with and kind of took for granted and then used that as a chance to actually surprise them and scare them and horrify them uh I keep mentioning awesome Wells uh the the secret is we were trying to make the Citizen Cane of video games uh so we were explicitly like let's just learn everything about awesome Wells and that will get us there um we did lots of prototyping on this idea of like hidden aspects to the footage uh this idea like I said of like rewinding being a way of accessing and resurrecting and discovering things um and we knew it was going to work because we did tests with footage of me during the pandemic just at home and it still frightened me like when stuff would appear and pop out or fade in when I wasn't expecting it um

and the few things we kind of iterated on in this mechanic that are interesting um originally we had a lot more of these kind of invisible Cuts where uh a character would walk off screen and then seamlessly we would transition to a different version of this scene um and those were really cool and we used qu those in the game but then when we were actually implementing them we discovered that there were places where we actually created a jump cut that should actually be kind of more scary and more horrific so we kind of started adding those in um we have this concept of free floating moment so a lot of the Supernatural and hidden scenes are linked to specific instances right and very located in the moment um but to facilitate keeping things spooky there are a whole bunch of scenes that are free floating that the code will attach to a clip if it feels like oh I haven't seen anything spooky for a while here's a place we could insert something and it'll kind of fit those in so it's trying to keep things interesting and and then we played around a lot with what people now call the immortality noise of like how do we add these audio

layers to hint on the menu on the grid and also within the footage to let you know there's something creepy and usually people kind of start hearing that and paying attention to it and then 30 minutes later is when they really like hang okay and discover things but uh thanks Metroid Prime because we talked a lot about how Metroid Prime hints its Secrets uh with audio um so now we've got two minutes to get into the spreadsheets which is why you're all here um everyone always ask me like how the hell do you how do you do this how do you create these things um and the answer is like lots of spreadsheets lots of outlining like we started here with early plans of like the meta story of Marissa Marcel figuring out the years what was happening to Marissa Marcel across the different time periods uh then we came up with the three movies and we outlined and scripted out the Beats for all of these movies um then we got a producer to look at it and give us a shoot order of how would they actually have shot this movie what order would it have been shot in and transpose that

onto Marissa Marcel's story so we could find synergies and beats of like oh if this thing happens to Marissa it' be cool if it happened whilst they were shooting this thing we took these outlines put them back into order gave them to some of the greatest screenwriters uh uh in history like Barry gford Alan Scott Amelia Gray who I've worked with before um they went and wrote us the movies based on these outlines like whole full finished screenplays of movies brought those back moved them around again I sat down and then I injected the making of stuff I was like well if they're shooting this scene what is Marissa saying what's happening what's the gun behind the scenes drama so we started to kind of work into these screenplays and create the story of Marissa that kind of weaved into them and we get to a point where we have okay I'm nearly there uh we had this sheet which was called the organizing Monster uh which is a giant this is like a teeny slice of it uh uh giant spreadsheet that is like everything in the game H and then we use what I call the Hologram method which is

how do these nonlinear things that you make Sam make sense and the answer is like a hologram contains in every piece of it like the information for the whole rest of the image right so we look at every scene and we have all these columns and it's like every scene has to meaningfully answer a question about Marissa's story tell us a piece of plot beat from the fictional movie have a piece of craft from movie making have some hint at The Meta story tell the story of what's going on with Arthur Fisher what's happening with Robert Jones uh have a piece of imagery that resonates with our themes of all three of our themes that we're tracking and like we just go through and make sure that every scene is doing everything so that then when the player starts combining them in different orders they can meaningfully make progressions in theme or in story if they're digging into a particular character or subset of the story they can meaningfully put put these things together and as well like having seen this thing seeing this other scene now I put the two things together and I get

some some kind of Greater Insight so this is just like it's all just about lots and lots of work and like just going over it again and again and again iterating these outlines in these story beats um so then uh we're almost done how did we then decide this thing worked how do you test it uh it's just a script and just an outline uh so we would take the script um any object that was in the scene uh would be underlined in the script um and then code would import the entire script uh in Fountain format which is like this kind of markup version of screenwriting um and it would extract all of the images characters and uh we had this looping scene from eyes wide shut and it basically generated the entire game of immortality based on the screenplay so you could drop into a scene and it would just Loop Tom Cruz taking your shoes off and then it would beat out the dialogue time out the dialogue based on the script Place some of the action lines and every time an object or a character came into the script they' get this little box that would appear on the screen so I could

sit and play the whole game and click on these boxes and imagine the finished game right and this was never a useful prototype and none of my prototypes are ever useful to give to to normal human beings but there's enough there that I can answer questions around pacing discoverability feel flow um and kind of get to the point where we feel good um and we can also run like algorithmic tests that tell us how Interlink scenes are how frequently certain things appear and we can kind of tweak based on that so we basically just play this a lot we look at all the data we're extracting from the script and use that to balance the script and the format so that then we can go and shoot three entire movies and and have a game that works at the end of it right um what next this is it it's my final slide we're slightly over but um are there any takeaways uh if you want to make immortality that's how we did it um but I think genuinely there's stuff that we're doing that I I think is really

interesting like this idea of Randomness and narrative I think is a really interesting thing to explore um you know we we're so tied to narratives that are on train tracks and the idea of causality and systems that actually injecting a little bit of spice I think is really interesting uh thinking about exploring narrative content directly right you're not exploring a world and discovering bits of narrative like you in the weeds of the narrative so many interesting applications of that for me think about expressivity over simulation like how is this meaningfully expressive for the player how are they individually expressing themselves if you watch two different people play immortality they will have very different experiences in their heads but also in what they're doing what they're clicking on the flow through the game like it's meaningful to them it's meaningfully personable and and kind of expressive um and then just fundamentally if I have one takeaway it's like this idea of losing the container plot people ask me like how do your games still tell a story that makes sense if it's all out of order and it's

like well plot isn't interesting or relevant like plot is a requirement of a movie because people are sat in a chair and they need the toilet and they're getting tired and they're looking for 90 minutes or three hours if it's a Marvel movie looking at the screen and so plot is this thing that's like keeps their attention right what happens next What's happen next what's next what's next we don't need that because we have all these other things we have the challenge in the exploration and the expressivity so we have an Engaged audience so these conventional ideas of plot and how you order and contain things are things that we can kind of mve Beyond um that's something I would love to see more of there we go uh tail slates um that's when you do when you have like a a messed up shot and you can't actually get The Clapper board in shot to start with because it's all complicated so at the very end camera assistant runs in and says tail slates and they have the thing upside down um and it's really cool and it's never not cute to see the camera assistant run in excitedly to do and cool tail slates uh it's the funnest

thing uh I guess we can go outside if anyone has any questions uh thank you for listening and pting up with [Music] me