Chris Olivia

Well, I think it's extremely similar in that the main goal is to capture performance. In film, you're really worried about one or two cameras. If there's a B camera, you're worried about just the frame itself, composition, and sort of the movement within that frame, if the emotion's coming through. For a game, for motion capture, you sort of have to be a little bit more open-ended, as far as you don't know exactly where the camera's gonna be, the environment or space maybe hasn't been worked out fully yet, so you're probably focused a little bit more as a director on the performance itself, almost like a stage play.

Well, that was way before me. That was during the original trailer and the fan funding in 2012. Chris Roberts had an artist named Jim Martin come up with a bunch of different designs. And we knew it was going to be our main bad guy. And I think that the original inspiration was, if I can say it, Kilrathi-inspired. Right, but new, improved, cooler, better, different. So he came up with great designs, models built, CGBot built the final game asset. It was in the trailer. It looked great. That was a long time ago, though, before we all kind of got into the groove.

It's an evolutionary process. So as we all started, we got into developing the look and feel of what the Vanduul culture is. And so part of that is getting various concept artists to help develop the look of the characters, the world, based on what the fiction is. And so we got a great artist named John Dickinson coming up with just brilliant alien biomechanical, but very different from the Alien look. So it's a really, really great, interesting, unique look that everybody's happy with. So as that's moving along and he's developing the look of it, we're having to revisit the original first Vanduul ship to bring that into the look and feel of the style of the Vanduul.

Well, I think since the universe is so huge, if you look on this planet and you see the diverse influences on this one world, just imagine what an entire universe, how diverse that would be. So I could say yes to both of those and all of the above. And I think we're just looking to set a look in the different systems to be very unique and very varied. So it's just going to be something that we sort of discover, but it's going to be very diverse. It's not going to be locked into one sort of style.

There's always constraints. It always starts with the director, the person that's giving you the orders. And then it's just about the world that this character or creature is going to be living in. And a lot has to do with gameplay and whether these characters need to fly human ships or vice versa. So there's those basic constraints, but usually you always try to go into creating something with a very open mind and just a clean slate and clean palette.

And a lot of those are playable characters, right? But there's a lot of room in our universe for non-human form type NPCs.

Yeah, absolutely. So then we'll vary from the humanoid sort of form. It'll be very varied, and hopefully it'll be something very unique.

Well, actually before I got into films, I started working for Chris Roberts. And so he always had a very filmic style anyway, to start with. So that was there right from the get-go working for Chris. And then having gone to California and worked at some of the big effects companies, every pixel is examined to the closest sort of scrutiny. And that's reviewed by many different layers of people. So I think that level of care given to the final image is what is going to help me in this position, making sure that this...

Because like you're saying, everybody reviews it along the way, and it gets to you now. Hopefully by the time it gets to you, the guys have done a really awesome job, and you're like, maybe a tweak here or there, but that really looks good, right?

Right.

I usually lean towards the bad... probably either bounty hunter or just something where I can do bad things. Dressed in black for a reason. All black.

Generally speaking, anything that Steven Spielberg does from a film standpoint. Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro with the Hellboy series. He's got a very unique look that he keeps in all his films. Game design... I don't know.

What about Cameron? Do you like Cameron stuff too, Prometheus style?

Well, I like Prometheus, but that's Ridley Scott. Prometheus was a beautiful movie. You felt like it was a real place. And that's hopefully what we're going to do here too. It's not going to be flashy for flashy's sake, or overly this or that. Hopefully it'll feel like you're immersed in a real place.