Adrian Carr – A Film Director’s Take on Tex Murphy
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Actors aside… any other gossip from the game’s development?
[b]Adrian[/b]: As you know my WANKER T-shirt has been featured prominently in various photos and videos. One afternoon I was reviewing one of the 3D rooms with Greg when I was called onto the green screen stage and there in front of me was a lineup of all the Kickstarter backers with their backs to me, all wearing black T-shirts. They turned around and I saw a bunch of ‘WANKERS’ standing in front of me. Mac from London was the ringleader. I like to run a fun set. Keeping on the T-shirt theme for a second, Mac also printed up a handful of them with two of Greg Green’s favorite expressions: “Why aren’t we shooting” and “Hand on switch”. We paraded around in front of him for about 90 minutes until Bobby James pointed them out. Greg collapsed laughing and was humbled.
Talking of backers who helped on set, there was one in particular who would crank up music in his headset because he didn’t want to hear any spoilers.
We could afford the majority of actors for one day only, so I ended up doubling for Todd Bridges after he had wrapped, which meant my donning his garb and being made up as a Morlock. After shooting my scenes I had no time to remove the make-up because I was still directing. But there still wasn’t any time after wrap to remove the make-up before going to dinner with Richard Norton and his wife Judith. I certainly had my share of gawkers trying to figure out if I was contagious or not.
Every guy and maybe a couple of the girls on set were jealous of Kish [wardrobe] having to smooth out the latex cat-suit. I will let your minds run wild with that one.
The backers were excited about being blown away in the raid on the Tesla Institute and Richard Norton was on hand to ensure they died convincingly.
Saving the best for last: Mat Van Rhoon, our Visual Effects Supervisor, attached orange ping-pong balls to the green screen so he could align camera movement for VFX shots. If the balls were not aligned properly, Greg the DP called out to Mat from behind the monitor: “Mat, can you get your balls in order.” One time Mat says, “OK you can touch my balls now.” You can take that any way you want, but he did have a lot of offers. There was a frantic search when Mat called out “I’ve lost my balls” or when one fell off and rolled away, we’d go chasing down Mat’s ball. Jen was seen holding one of Mat’s crushed balls in her hand. Mat and Chris were joking about Mat’s balls during rehearsal, and after Mat walked away, Bjorn joked, “That took a lot of balls.” When Jen returned home to Washington she found one of Mat’s balls in her bag and called him, “Don’t worry, your ball’s in good hands.”
Green screen set of Tesla Effect, complete with Mat’s balls on back wall
[b]Ingmar[/b]:
The Pandora Directive
was an enormous improvement in terms of FMV compared to
UAKM
, while
Overseer
was another step forward that marked the most impressive video production of any Tex Murphy game we’d seen so far. In what ways will
Tesla Effect
be another improvement in terms of film production and a better combination of FMV and interactivity?
[b]Adrian[/b]: The 15-year gap between
Overseer
and
Tesla Effect
has seen huge strides made in digital technology. In our case the biggest advantages have enabled us to shoot and display the action at 24 frames per second and in 16×9 format. The second advantage is the advanced look of 3D sets. I’ll admit when I first saw the sets that Brian Johnson and Doug Vandegrift had created, I felt a cold sweat break out. How do I do their sets justice?
We shot the production with the Canon C100. (We would have preferred the C300 because of the ability to extract green screen elements easier, but budget was a significant factor, especially considering the scale of what we are attempting to achieve in FMV.) My secret weapon… Mat Van Rhoon! Mat was able to pull off miracles that I’ll deal with in more detail later.
The Monastery in Tesla Effect
For me, the most significant improvement is the integration of real actors, not CGI characters, into the 3D world inside the actual Unity Engine. Bear with me now… in the previous Tex games, all the environments were designed using a software package like Maya or Max and these would be down-rezzed and converted to real-time graphics with a low polygon count that was optimized so that the computers at the time could enable the player to freely explore that location. We used higher fidelity, well-lit, textured, pre-rendered environments for the background plates to go ‘behind’ the actors once the blue screen was removed.
The big leap for
Tesla Effect
is that we are using those 3D environments straight out of the Unity Engine; for example, the teaser trailer released recently shows exactly what the game will look like if you were to remove the actors [other than the depth of field we use]. Chris Kelly at Big Finish Games wrote proprietary code that allowed us to simulate a cinema camera. We can tell Unity we’re using an 85mm or 120 mm lens so it will have x depth of focus at this particular angle. In some cases we will separate out a foreground element so we can ‘sandwich’ the actor between it and the background, placing them ‘inside’ the location. The big advantage of this is that when the player steps into a room and activates a cut scene or interactive conversation, there is no discernable break between leaving the real-time environment and entering the FMV.
Dalton (Adrian Carr) gets rid of evidence on a new part of Chandler Avenue in Tesla Effect
Add to this achievement the ability to track the camera within 2D and 3D space. As I said earlier, there was a huge restriction previously on how much you could move the camera because the technology to track didn’t exist at that time. With current digital technology and Mat’s orange balls, we now have the ability to crane up and down, track backwards, forwards and sideways, even go handheld when warranted. Thus everything recorded live on the green screen set is translated into the Unity engine and subsequently into Adobe After Effects, which in turn allows us to bind the actors to the backgrounds.
In terms of the next Tex game I see unlimited possibilities in terms of shooting. If budget was not an issue I would use the Arri Alexa next outing, introduce more camera movement, expand the scale and texturing of sets and try more interesting character interactivity. However, no matter how great we make it look, I will be restricted by the all important issue of memory availability to allow the game to run without moving at a snail’s pace on a computer, so there’s fantasy and there’s reality.
[b]Ingmar[/b]: Chris Jones has come a long way from the cheesy slapstick of
UAKM
to the much more serious and emotional performance in
Overseer
. How do you look at his evolution as an actor and in what ways did he improve even more on the set of
Tesla Effect
?
[b]Adrian[/b]: Chris Jones is a natural actor and he uses his common sense logic to make Tex Murphy believable even when the situations he finds himself in are, at times, unbelievable. Thankfully, Chris has a knack for comic timing, something you have or don’t have, and it is one of the elements that is key to the success of Tex Murphy.
We have all watched Chris’s growth as an actor from
UAKM
to
The Pandora Directive
then
Overseer
, and now 15 years later on
Tesla Effect
. A sign of how he has grown as an actor is the ease in which he slips on the trenchcoat and fedora and immediately becomes Tex Murphy.
Chris has not dropped a beat; if anything he is more at ease than ever in the demanding role as Tex. I suppose there is a confidence that comes with having gone toe to toe with actors like Michael York, Barry Corbin and the late Kevin McCarthy, and Chris has it in spades.
In
Tesla Effect
there is more at stake for Tex personally and Chris had to dig deeper than he has in the past to deliver the honesty in his performance, all the while maintaining the fine balance of Tex’s comedic tone, the heavy drama and action. Don’t forget, Chris runs his other company TruGolf while he is shooting Tex Murphy, so how he remembers the extraordinary amount of lines and the variety of attitudes for the different paths I do not know. What I do know is: I am one lucky director.
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