John Schimmel

I was between jobs and Hollywood was in a strange time, so you took what you could get. And I was about to go to work with somebody who is written up in more than one book about Hollywood as the worst person in the world to work for. And I had met a guy named Hawk Koch. He was the line producer on the Schwarzenegger movie Collateral Damage that I helped produce. And Hawk called me up and said, 'You can't do that.' And he had just become a partner in Ascendant Pictures, which was Chris's film company, which was the venture that he did between the Wing Commander stuff. And so I met Chris and his partners at the time, and he brought me on as president of production at that company. It was a really interesting company. We were somehow the American agents for a German tax fund. And for anybody that knows about filmmaking, we had 20% first money in, last money out to contribute to movies, which made us incredibly valuable. And we did Lord of War and we did Outlander and Lucky Number Slevin and a bunch of interesting films. And then that company went the way of production companies. The distribution deals make it really hard to survive. And then after that went away, Chris and I had lunch once a month for a while while he was putting this together. Chris and me and his giant dog, Paddington, who we would walk to lunch and then feed bread, his favorite bread from the restaurant we always ate at. Anyway, at some point, Chris said he had put this together and asked me if I wanted to come run narrative. And I said, 'Yeah, sure.' That was 10 years ago.

That shoot was like nothing I think anybody has ever encountered. Actually, the first role I had on that shoot was that from Los Angeles I decorated a house in Ealing for Chris and Dave Haddock and myself and Hannes Appel to live in. So we had this sort of communal house. We had turned the living room into the face scan place, and I turned the garage into a clubhouse with a giant television in it. And we were about a block from the studio. So that was pretty wonderful. The conceit of that shoot was, it was 2015 and we were going to release the game in 2017. So we were in sort of a hurry. It was a 90-day shoot. We had, I think, three days of pre-production meetings, maybe. And we had, I think, seven out of what eventually became 21 or 23 scripts written. And so Hannes and Dave and Phil Meller and I basically built a schedule together based on an outline. We would go, 'Well, this is what's going to happen in this scene. Well, that'll probably take three days,' right? Insane. And then started making these giant cast deals, because we had that spectacular cast, but we were sort of guessing about how much time we were going to need for it. So it wasn't exactly relaxing, that process. I started there with just me and a production manager, and then Chris brought on this amazing line producer, Philippa Knott, and I'm going to say her name because she's amazing and she deserves employee appreciation. And the three of us ran the production office, and it was on fire most days, a metaphorical fire. And the goal was to not allow that fire to touch the set, so that Chris could have a relaxed set. But we were juggling actors and trying to make deals and script pages. I don't know why Haddock or Weissbaum are alive. Dave especially was on set all day, because he was valuable to Chris as a creative partner on set, and then he'd go home and write scripts, and then he'd show up in the morning with the pages they were going to shoot that day. It was nuts. But it was really fun. At the time we didn't really have much of an in-house mocap crew, so the Imaginarium crew were sort of half of the control area, and they were wonderful. And our side was Will and Dave and Chris and myself and Hannes and this completely irreverent script supervisor, whose name I will leave out, who would say anything to anybody. And we laughed for 90 days, basically. It was enormous fun, and we got great, great stuff. It was still early in the mocap technology life. So many of our actors, especially the name actors, had never done it before. And what they discovered was a kind of democracy on the set, because everybody was wearing the same not flattering suit, the jumpsuit with the buttons on it. There are no real sets on stage. Sometimes we would pull up a set from the game, but mostly you're working with plywood and two-by-four timbers, because the motion capture cameras don't see anything on set except the balls. So it doesn't matter what they look like. They just need to match the measurements in the engine so that people aren't leaning through a bar or sleeping in the middle of a bed or something. So they variously described it as kindergarten, as black box theater. But it required tremendous imagination on their part. And they mostly loved, not everybody, but mostly loved it.

It's a lot like doing a play, or rehearsing a play rather, because the audience isn't in the room.

It's a lot like doing a play. Well, and the other thing is that if you're doing a movie or you're shooting a television show... and this is part of the challenge of shooting it, of acting it, and of writing it: you don't have a focus. You're playing to the world, because everything in the environment is visible and possible. So you're playing for big, you're playing for small, you're playing for next to you, you're playing for somebody across. It's very interesting.

Well, will they be able to create new history for the system? Yes.

I mean, that's the idea.

Yeah, really, once it gets to the newsworthy level of actions or something big enough happens, hopefully we'll be watching that on a game level and being able to track and incorporate that into the lore is really our hope.

If the economy of a system tanks because resources are down or crime is up, then that ideally would affect the look of the area or the direction that the system takes, because there's now a crime-ridden system rather than a neutral one.

Yeah, we were talking to the environment artists about the potential of maybe being able to have the economy affect how much litter you find on the ground or how much graffiti is on the wall. So the worse a place is off economically, the more dirty and grungy it's going to look, and vice versa. So if you help an area out, if you start shipping more and more stuff to it, maybe it starts cleaning up its act a little bit.

But a player's ability to impact the way the history is written depends on the extent of the impact of what they're doing. We probably won't memorialize you having a beer.

On the Galactapedia side, as it updates, as the game unfolds, as the game is fully released, we would very much like to be able to record impactful player events, like taking down a well-known pirate, for example. That's what we really want to do.

Yeah, it's just the challenge of finding the right threshold on which you go from, like John said, just being another person out there, being a part of the solution or part of the problem, to actually doing enough of something to become well known for it. Sort of like life.

It's part of casting, for sure. When we talk to the casting director, we very specifically ask for diversity.

It's definitely the case when we're naming characters, because one of the ideas is that international boundaries have dissolved in the Empire. Now it's more about planets. So before, where you would have these names that were segregated by what country you were from, those boundaries have definitely eroded away. So as we develop names, it's kind of fun sometimes. A good method is to take a first name from one country and a surname from another country and combine them in interesting ways.

Yeah, I personally keep a stack of magazines at my desk and sometimes I'll just open one up to one page and choose a first name, open it up to another and choose a second name, and just try to put something together that way. Making every name a reference or named after someone, it takes too much thought. Sometimes when you're writing, you just need a name, and sometimes it's best just to make it slightly more random.

I mean, we can. I try not to retcon. Personally, I don't like retconning unless absolutely necessary. But technically, it's all malleable. It's just we're developing in a public face, so it's a little weird. We have to choose what we can retcon. Usually, if it's something really firmly established, I think we try to do whatever we can to not retcon it. But if it's little details, it's OK to amend it to save us some trouble down the line or make something else work.

Yeah, I would say, under normal circumstances, you'd be free to retcon whatever up until release, right? But because we're so public facing, it does give you an additional challenge.

Yeah. Well, you have to be really careful that you don't retcon yourself into a story that's gibberish.

Yeah, there's a lot of ripples from when you change one small detail, and we see it all the time. We'll try to adjust something, and then it really spiderwebs quickly into a whole bunch of smaller other changes.

Yeah, because the game is so story-driven, there's like a film version of an ecology to it, and it's shocking how much impact one small change can make, so it requires a lot of care.

I mean, we've been pretty good about them so far. I think with a lot of this stuff, at least with the current developments of Vega II and Bishop's campaign, these things don't happen on a dime. So we have a little bit of latitude. We try to build that in, I guess, to make it a bit easier, but at least particularly with the Vanduul war, I think we have some latitude as to when events happen around the ones that we've established. So we have room to play, and we don't paint ourselves too badly into a corner.

Yeah, 900 years of history is a lot of time. So Dave did a really good job at the start laying these foundations through This Day in History and a really broad timeline. And so there's these big gaps, though. And with that much time, it's pretty easy just to toss something in between two different dates and have it work out for the most part. Dates, I think, have so far been one of the things we've had to retcon least. They've been pretty sticky.

There's a lot of wrestling.

Yeah, because it was the systems, actually. Once we started building the system maps, because originally, at the initial phase, the PU was only, I think, supposed to be 20 or 30 star systems, and then it expanded. So the ones that we had already created expanded out, and suddenly there were now 100 or 110 or whatever the number is. So the Time Capsule had established dates that now had to be transposed to this new arrangement of systems. So some of them got a little funky. Specifically, the system where first contact with the Banu happened was much closer to Earth, but when the map expanded, suddenly it was far away from the Banu. So it didn't really make sense. So we had to figure out how to place it so it made sense in the narrative, again, without retconning too badly.

Yeah, I forgot about that, all the hard work you did on that discovery timeline, making sure when the Star Map was final that we were discovering things in the right order, because I think there were a couple of instances where a system that was really far away had originally been discovered much sooner than was humanly possible.