Introduction to Contextual Studies

The seminar this morning introduced the Topic of the next 7 weeks contextual studies – and this is; Roles and Practices within the games industry. My initial understanding of this phrase is that it describes the possible job roles and how they are undertaken in various environments within a games company or production structure. This was proven to be roughly correct as the lecturer Mark Wickham showed  two documentaries which outlined the production processes of ‘Star Wars episode 3: Revenge of the Sith’ and ‘Resident Evil 5’.

Just looking at the Resident Evil 5 documentary, all areas of production were covered. Considering the size of the games company Capcom and their series Resident Evil, the pre-production stages were important. Beginning by combining their international and other branches in Los Angeles, several criteria were formed in those early meetings, including the overall theme of the game and style of presentation (a Hollywood style of unfolding story). Furthermore an onus was placed on experimenting with new technologies. Given these base thoughts on how the production should flow, the decision to base the production in California was made.

The next stage that was taken was the bringing in both Conceptual artworks (taken from a company outside of the Capcom design team) and Actors to base the vocal and physical look of the characters in game. In addition to this a freelance director was hired, who had made his name in advertisement commercial directing, before moving on to directing professional films. The next step that needed to be made was outlining the story and gameplay.

This process is often known in the industry as ‘Pre –Vis’ and refers to a pre visualisation of the end product. Capcom made two distinct ‘Pre-Vis’; a basic virtual gameplay simulation and a Video storyboard. The video storyboard used the ‘body’ actors of the characters to emulate the actions of the virtual Pre Vis, but with a bit more freedom, while the facial/ vocal actors acted out the script. Both methods were then combined, replacing the video characters with the actors and the additional script readings. This gave an approximate recreation of the director and production teams’ outlook of what they wanted the product to be.

However, since it was just an approximation, the next step was to implement Motion Capture so that the animation/ programming team would have characters which moved realistically. The director on the shoot remarked that working with motion capture gave a way that he could get the best out of the performance as he could focus on getting the movements of each actor perfect. The motion capture aspect of production was exhaustive, with stunt men hired to act out the action scenes, actors trained to use objects the way their character used it (for example the actor playing ‘Sheva Almaar’ had to be trained to use a handgun left handed), and the smallest movements were recreated to the best possible outcome.

Having finished the motion capture sequences, the director was then trained in using a ‘Virtual Camera’. This instrument allowed the director to control the camera movement in the game world – in a similar process to filming an action in real life. With this, the cinematic sequences were finalised except for two aspects – Facial Motion Capture and Soundtrack. The facial Motion Capture was achieved through the use of motion capture sticky points, which together in specific places on the face would pick up facial movement and usual sound capture methods. By having separate facial/ Vocal actors to body actors meant that the work was a little more difficult but never the less the syncing was not an issue as the facial and vocal actors were the same.

The method which was used for the recording of the soundtrack was through the use of a recording stage, used by 20^th Century Fox, a live orchestra, a composer and conductor (both of which were famed in the industry). Other vocal talents were enlisted to highlight an African theme, and they were recorded in an external location which had a more intimate recording studio – allowing the Composer and Conductor to perfectly recreate their vision.

From the Resident Evil documentary it was made clear just how important all of these various job roles are and how much work is needed to make a top quality game from pre-production to post production. The extract Mark showed from the Star Wars ‘Under a Minute documentary further amplified this. Some initial stats shown at the start were that in a minute of film in the climactic battle sequence of Star Wars episode 3, it took:

1185 frames

910 artists

And 70441 man hours

These stats are so huge that it can seem terrifying and this was not including the huge branching mind map of contributors to the scene that was shown a couple of moments after. The roles and practices within any industry are important let alone the games industry so this will be an important area of study.
The first task of my contextual analysis is to look at the production to two different games. I will probably use games such as Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Dead Rising 2 which offer a making of documentary as a basis or starting point.