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Levine gets dramatic when writing, directing for BioShock: Infinite
Irrational Games' Ken Levine writes video games through the lens of a playwright and stage director, having penned plays since the age of 14 and majoring in drama in college. This perspective on storytelling helped him write the audio logs in BioShock, and it's shaping the way he directs the voice actors -- in person for the first time -- in BioShock: Infinite, Levine told Gamasutra. Writing Elizabeth and Booker, Infinite's main characters, was a completely different process than writing BioShock's antagonist, Andrew Ryan, Levine said. "I always had Ayn Rand in my ear while I was writing him, and she is quite articulate in her viewpoints. So he was a pretty easy character to write, for me," Levine said. "Booker and Elizabeth, because there's a very different constraint set, because I haven't done this kind of writing for a game before, where you sort of have all this dynamism with a character you're walking around the world with, that you're speaking to, as Booker... just the mechanics of it!" Levine said he was inspired by the easy banter Naughty Dog placed in Uncharted, and he saw how it could transfer to a period piece. As he describes them, Levine's characters are unique to their time period and his own imagination: "Elizabeth is a person who sees nothing and wants to see everything, and Booker is somebody who's seen everything and wants to see nothing. They're at opposite ends of the spectrum." The full (and long) interview is here, if you're interested in details about how Levine makes women weep.
EVE Spotlight: An interview with Clear Skies creator Ian Chisholm
EVE Spotlight is a biweekly feature in which we interview prominent members of EVE Online's player community or development team. Every two weeks, we'll be shining the spotlight on a player or developer who has a significant impact on EVE to highlight the efforts of EVE's most influential people. EVE Online is well-known for its community's awesome cinematic productions, and no film is more renowned than the incredible machinima Clear Skies. Directed by Ian Chisholm, Clear Skies seamlessly merges in-game EVE footage with scenes composed using Valve's Source development kit. The films follow the adventures of captain John Rourke and his crew aboard the Minmatar Tempest class battleship Clear Skies. With more luck than sense, the Clear Skies crew continually finds itself in sticky situations but manages to come out on top. The first Clear Skies film won the award for best long-format film at the 2008 annual Machinima Filmfest, and a second film solidified the series' huge cult following. Clear Skies has even inspired other players like Kyoko Sakoda to produce their own cinematic masterpieces set in the EVE Online universe. The third and probably final film in the Clear Skies series was released earlier this week, absolutely shattering all expectations. In this massive edition of EVE Spotlight, I interview Clear Skies creator Ian Chisholm to find out all about the production of Clear Skies III.
The Departed: 'Made by a Mac' gets new meaning
The Departed finally netted Martin Scorsese an Academy Award that many felt was long overdue. I personally haven't seen it yet (I know, I know), but the film has just become notable for another reason: Scorsese used iChat to direct one of its final shots. As the monstrous Macenstein tells the summarized story from a Blackmagic Design case study on the film, filming had wrapped in LA, but Scorsese called for a re-shoot of one scene. The only problem was: he was in NY, and the crew was still in LA. The solution? The crew set up a Mac and "aimed iChat at the video tap on the camera" so Scorsese could view the action in NY (note the interesting use of calling the iSight + iChat setup as simply 'iChat'). A microphone and speaker system were also set up so Scorsese could call the shots as he was viewing footage in real time.[via digg]
