This is a transcription of all of the text, narration and the interviews from the documentary "The Captured Actor". At the moment, the public version of the video is in the final stages of being tinkered with, and will be posted to YouTube and to Vimeo in the very near future. However, I thought I might as well get this posted while we wait, as it were. :) Watch this space for a link to the film once it has been released.
NOTE: This text is presented for educational purposes only, and not for publication elsewhere without the express permission of the copyright owner (Iain Lowson). Links are given to relevant websites for the individuals involved, and for the games, events, and organisations featured, in the text and at the end in the credits section. No responsibility can be taken for the content of those sites linked to from this interview. Click at your own risk! :)
INTRO TEXT
This documentary was a response to an invite to give a talk
at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Learning & Teaching Conference in
early September 2019. Shot and edited across the space of a month, the version
shown then was 48 minutes long. This version has additional footage.Not wanting to trust to my own ability to be interesting, I decided to interview people who could be relied on to be fascinating. Indeed, all involved were downright compelling, transcending my own incompetence in the field of audio recording (there’s a reason I don’t normally do that bit).
As a result of the knowledge and experience of the interviewees, this documentary answers the brief I was given – how is modern technology impacting on opportunities for actors, and how should institutions like the RCS react to and prepare their students for those opportunities? I hope that it continues to prove useful beyond the conference, and the conversations it started there.
Iain Lowson
(Oct. 2019)
NARRATOR
This documentary is *not* about the games industry.
This documentary *is* about the place actors can find within what has consistently remained one of the fastest growing entertainment sectors in the UK and in the world at large, one that employs many thousands of actors annually and puts them in front of an audience of tens of millions.
Despite what the tabloid press would have you believe, the video games business does not consist of the mutated denizens of dark cellars determinedly working towards the destruction of all that is good and just, and laughing while they steal enormous sums money from hard-working people through shady deals.
That’s Brexit.
Gathering our video game experts, we travelled to London and to Side Global; a company who work hand-in-hand with the games industry, casting actors for voice over work as well as for projects involving motion capture and performance capture, and then recording that work for games as well as for animation, commercials, and many others.
To explain a little about what the games industry actually is, where it came from and where it’s going, we spoke to Andy Payne, O.B.E., a businessman who was there right from the founding of the industry in the 1980’s, and who is still actively involved today.
Participant
Andy Payne, O.B.E
So. My name’s Andy Payne. I’m a games industry professional.
I’ve worked in games all my life. Done nothing else, for my sins. At the moment
I am a investor, founder, advisor, producer of everything around video games. I
only work in video games. Projects I’m working on at the moment, amongst
others, are Animal Farm, which we’re figuring out as a game, for
obvious reasons. Pretty prescient, I think.WHAT WAS THE SCALE OF THE GAMES INDUSTRY IN 1985 WHEN YOU STARTED?
Back then, it was very much a bunch of, effectively, bedroom coders. Mainly boys/men. Many, many sets of brothers in the UK, which is another story. Incredible, man. At least 22 sets of brothers that I could point to, most of whom are still alive, and most of whom are still involved in the industry.
The industry itself was global without anybody realising it. Each country had a kind of, a scene, and distribution was physical. We didn’t really know what, you know, was going on in America, or Germany. We knew what was going on in Japan because we bought those games.
So, you know, it was a burgeoning industry. It was much like today, you know; tonnes of talented people with great ideas, with no rulebook, on a set of changing technology platforms.
WHAT IS THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRY NOW?
Where we are is in a period of rich growth. We’re in a period whereby the business models are not single; there are multiple business models across the games industry. And that differentiates us massively from the other screen entertainments, I think in a good way because it gives customers choice. But it can be very challenging. The global games industry is about a hundred billion (dollars), and that actually is still behind – when you add up all of the screen entertainment, TV, films, and streaming and everything else – roughly speaking that’s about $130 to $135 billion. So the games industry is a little bit behind, but the growth curves much more.
Video games industry, we are providing high growth, highly productive jobs. Even with all the talk of AI, machine learning, etc, there is still required a lot of human skin and brain and bone to be able to make this stuff.
HOW DOES TECHNOLOGY DRIVE THE GAMES INDUSTRY? IS THERE SPACE FOR CREATIVE PEOPLE?
I think, looking back on it, and looking back on it, looking right now, looking forward, the video games industry has never had a stable platform. The platforms have always developed, and that’s kept everybody on their toes. What that means is that, as a developer, you have to up your game in order to both anticipate and capitalise on the technology improvements.
I mean, in all of our pockets, most of our pockets, we’ve got smartphones. They’ve got more power than the PlayStation 1 or a PlayStation 2. And because of the technology moving apace, content needs to catch up, or at least stay ahead. And that’s about making sure that games play really well, I mean, they’ve got to play well, they’ve got to look good, and they’ve got to be engineered right.
NARRATOR
Finding a place in such an ever-shifting industry can be somewhat daunting for actors and even their agents. Fortunately, help is out there.We spoke to Key staff at Side London to look at what their company does.
Participants
Martin Vaughan (Casting Director), & Sini Downing (Production Director)WHAT IS IT THAT SIDE LONDON DOES FOR ACTORS?
SINI
We are very much about the performance and the character,
which I think the actors are as well. So we are already on the same plane that
way. So, yes, we’re working with the games, we’re kind of translating what the developers
want as well, but we know that to get the best out of the actors, we need to
give them as much information, time, and care as possible. So we are very much
for taking care of them: and that’s everything from casting them correctly;
making sure we’re not asking them to do accents that are way out of their
remit; we’re getting them an excellent director like Kate; we’re putting them
into a nice booth. Our engineers are fantastic with actors. They’re always
coming in to make sure they’re comfortable, and set up, and they’re happy to
make adjustments. And then there’s things like when we’re doing shouty
sessions, we’re making sure that they’re not doing very long sessions, we’re
taking care of their voices as well, because it doesn’t make any sense for us
to blow out their voices or, yeah, have a bad experience with us. We
want them to come back! And we want them to give their best.DO DEVELOPERS HAVE A BETTER UNDERSTANDING THEN THEY DID AS TO WHAT THEY ARE COMING TO WHEN THEY WORK WITH ACTORS?
SINI
I think so. Well… I think so. Most of them, they want the best as well, especially since there are so many great games and great performances in games now, they’ve kind of seen what’s possible. So they do want the best. I think we have some really good conversations to begin with, and we’re being brought in so much earlier now, it’s fantastic. Now we’re talking to them before they even have green lights, and they’re telling us, you know, this is the world we want to build, these are the characters we want to have in it. So we’re at the really early stages and we can help guide them in terms of what we’re going to need to give them the best.
We’re also now getting conversations where they’re like “We want to talk to the actors ahead of time. We’re still writing and we want to get them involved and get them involved in their characters”, and that’s just, you know, such a development.
HOW DOES BEING BROUGHT IN EARLY LIKE THAT WORK IN TERMS OF CASTING?
MARTIN
With those projects, as exciting as they are, like you say, from a casting point of view it’s still quite vague, because they’ve obviously got an idea in their head about the type of story they want to tell and the type of characters they want to inhabit that story, but not necessarily a specific type. So it’s quite intimidating, but at the same time it’s quite freeing because you’re then looking for strong young actors who you think are going to be able to go on this journey with the developers and that, you know, they’re going to be on the same page and they’ll shape the story together. So, yeah, it’s tricky but it’s, I think, the movement that we’ve got in it is what’s the best part of doing it, casting like that.
SINI
And it’s not always locked in, even if they look like they do have everything. We did a project, I think we must’ve cast it two or three years ago now, and recorded last year, they had character arcs, they had a full page of bio, they had backstory, we had the relationships to the other characters. We brought in an actress – this was for ‘Blood and Truth’ – who I don’t think was native to the accent they wanted.
MARTIN
No, she wasn’t.
SINI
She then auditioned in the accent they wanted – Kate did the auditions – and she said “You know what, let’s just do a take in your native accent, just because.” They (the developer) loved that performance so much that they actually rewrote her backstory to explain why she had a different accent from her dad >laughs< so that they could have this actress doing the best that she could.
DRAMA SCHOOLS ARE NOW COMING TO SIDE TO HELP THEIR STUDENTS LEARN ABOUT THE BUSINESS – WHAT STAGE IS THAT PROCESS AT?
SINI
We are developing our first program. It’s going to be two days of final year students coming in to be introduced into our booth. They’re doing audio at school, but they are coming in to hear about what it is to perform for games. Martin is going to be talking about what he’s looking for. They can ask him questions. Kate’s going to be taking them through ensemble, crowd, and solo performances and, yeah, just giving them a bit of exposure to the games world, because they have a year left and, you know what, we’re a good opportunity to work!
NARRATOR
To fully understand the opportunities available to actors, both those with experience at any level and those who are newly qualified, it’s important to talk to people who work in video games. At Side London, we gathered three individuals with around 40 years of combined experience in the games industry, two of whom also work extensively in theatre and television.Participants
Martin Vaughan (Casting Director), Kate Saxon (Director), & John Schwab (Actor)HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED WITH THE GAMES INDUSTRY?
JOHN
KATE
(Inaudible)
JOHN
Incredible! To be able to pull out, you know, and kind of push you in ways that you didn’t know you were going to go, or we never thought of. To go “No, I know you have something else in you.” And actually building a relationship between an actor and a director, I mean, I love when I walk in and see it’s Kate because I know there’s already a dialogue that we’’ have. And I know where she can take me and she knows where I can go. It’s really something to go from the audio engineer directing to now the route, like the traditional route now, where the director and actor work with each other to get a performance is… We’ve come full circle, as it were, to get to the point where it’s just, it is an acting job; it’s not a games job, it’s a proper acting job.
I mean, because you don’t forgive your ears, man, you know? If something’s slightly out of focus when you’re watching a movie, like it’s the audio you’ll really hear, and if it doesn’t ring true then it’s not going to come across, so we really strive for that, I think.
KATE
I think that’s particularly true for animation, actually, because – as you say – if you’ve got a visual medium with television or film, we can take in so many other things that all of our senses are going with. We’re looking into the person’s eyes and we’re reading other things that we might not hear tonally. But with animated games it’s absolutely got to be in the voice.
I’ve always said that it’s really important to think of the voice as everything not it is ‘just’ the voice. So exactly what John’s saying; it’s not just a voiceover job, it is an acting job where you have to bring the whole performance and character into the voice.
Actually, that segues into you saying how did we get into it – exactly what John said. That there was a time, you know, a while ago when things started moving from engineers directing or developers directing to directors doing it. That’s exactly why I got brought in, because Phil Evans, who was one of the owners of Side, knew my theatre directing work and approached me for exactly that reason; knowing that the industry had got to a point where they were not always quite getting the performances as they wanted, and the developer weren’t quite understanding why. And it was because they were game developers, they weren’t directors, they weren’t sharing the same language that we would share. And so it came to a point where they needed that missing link, and things very much changed from there on, I think. The industry changed quite a lot around that time.
HOW HAS THE INDUSTRY CHANGED SINCE YOU GOT INVOLVED?
KATE
I’ve worked in the industry for probably about 14, 15 years now, something like that, and so, obviously, I’m a woman in the gaming industry and, yes, we are still a minority but I think there are a lot of women working in more prominent positions now. A lot of game developers and game directors coming forward are women, composers and so on. I think the world of gaming has changed enormously in the time that I’ve been involved, in that the ambitions the developers have, the stories they want to tell are so much more sophisticated now because the audience for them is more sophisticated. So, I think the industry’s having to keep developing and keep maturing with it’s gamers, and that’s only ever going to be a good thing. So I think the idea of it being strange geeky men sat in their back rooms is an antiquated one now, and probably was correct 20 odd years ago, but it certainly isn’t that anymore.
JOHN
Yeah, I have to agree with Kate. I think the way that I’ve seen it go, and I’ve been in just as long as you, maybe even longer, just on the performance side I’ve seen them absolutely grow. From sitting in a booth along with another actor kind of trying to make a scene work, to do full bodysuit mocap and really getting into some proper acting, I think it’s amazing.
KATE
There are a lot of wonderful indie companies now, developers like The Chinese Room; they’re finding modern ways to use gaming. ‘Everybody’sGone to the Rapture’, which is one of the ones I’ve directed, there’s no killing, there’s no shooting in it. It’s all about investigating…
MARTIN
People!
KATE
There’s no people in it! It’s all about investigating why there’s no people in the village. And so, when you look at developers work with things like that, and also… This weekend just gone, for example, I was with a good friend of mine whose son is 13. He is being set homework on games, because they want him to learn strategizing and they think the gaming world is one of the best ways for him to learn. And he’s at a posh boys’ school. My friend was quite shocked, but he’d come home and said we need a better computer because I need to be able to play games because I need to for my schoolwork.
MARTIN
(Audible eye-roll, yet appreciative of the kid’s moxie.)
KATE
We’ve come a long way.
JOHN
Absolutely, yeah.
MARTIN
Yeah, the range of stories and characters that you find in games now, it’s just, it’s grown so much in the time that I’ve been casting them. Just the range of briefs that come through, and the types of narratives that they can tell, it’s just as the guys said, it’s the range of it has just grown so much as the technology’s grown, and the stories they can tell and want to tell in games has grown.
MARTIN HAD JUST BEEN INDUCTED INTO THE CASTING DIRECTORS’GUILD.
IS THIS FURTHER EVIDENCE OF THE GAMES INDUSTRY BEING TAKEN MORE SERIOUSLY?
MARTIN
Absolutely. And, you know, when I started having discussions with them about joining, it was clear that there wasn’t really a lot of games representation within the Guild itself.
KATE
I think you’re their first.
MARTIN
Yeah
JOHN
Wow
MARTIN
Yeah, it is exciting because, you know, there are people obviously that have never worked within that media, and I’ve not worked within their medium, so the fact that we’re able to co-exist and learn from each other and that all of those mediums are being taken seriously together is really exciting.
JOHN
I mean, congratulations, man. That is really such good news. Because putting together a cast, again that is believable, that takes a lot. ‘Cause there’s a huge amount of talent in one game, let alone the range that Side does.
MARTIN
With people’s attitudes changing over the years, over the past ten years that I’ve been doing it, you’ve been able to see that. You know, there are the guys that are obviously gamers that get really excited about doing the stuff, and then there’s the ones who come into it completely fresh who actually, once they get to know it, the ins and outs of it, with Kate taking them through it, you can see their juices start flowing and they start to really appreciate what’s going to happen.
HOW SIGNIFICANT DO YOU CONSIDER THE GANES INDUSTRY TO AN ACTOR’S CAREER?
KATE
For the acting industry, it is a massive employer. And I recommend all young actors to learn about performing in games, because there is a huge hole in their possible career if they don’t. I can’t tell you the thousands, literally thousands, of actors that we know who didn’t work in games before we got them invovled, and they’ve just never looked back. You know, they’ve ditched their day job working in a book shop, or their bar job that they’ve always had to do between their theatre and their TV work. And these are not just actors you don’t know. There’s this thing, of course, that a lot of actors you know still do a day job. There are so many actors now in this country who have ditched their day job because they’ve now broken into the games industry, and they can get enough work in that as well to keep their career going.
And I think… I used to be an actor as well, many, many eons ago, and at that time there was a lot of snobbery about commercials, there’s probably a similar thing to what it was about games 20 years ago as well, you know, that you wouldn’t do an ad unless you were a certain sort of actor. But now all those snobberies have gone. You know, it’s imperative that actors work across the industry – radio, film, TV, commercials, games, voice over, so on and so forth – because that is the way the industry works. As Martin says, the industries are working together now and it’s imperative, to have a career, to be able to work across the forms.
WORKING WITH THE TECHNOLOGY INHERENT IN GAMES CAN BE QUITE INTIMIDATING.
WHAT ARE THE PARALLELS BETWEEN WORKING IN GAMES AND IN THEATRE, TV, OR FILM?
JOHN
I find that in computer game acting, where there is a heightened sense of performance, that you have to get out of the way of yourself. I find it is completely liberating. And you learn very quickly just to stop stopping yourself. We go and do sessions where we are throwing pieces of metal across a studio while saying a line, you know, and all that kind of stuff, you know, and it is absolutely liberating. And I find it helps inform the other stuff, because there’s no embarrassment. You might be embarrassed about something on your head and jumping around looking like what I would have said was a fool but, no man, we’re doing something amazing.
Any young actor who is not thinking about doing this work – there’s more games, and more apps, and content, and everything people need – just jumping in with both feet and then getting out of the way of yourself. The performance is the same, as long as the story comes through, you know. As long as the story comes through.
KATE
And also, in terms of comparison to the industry – performance capture, because you can capture a whole scene and you’ve got the cameras on all four sides, I liken it to theatre in the round. So the actors can perform truthfully, as if it’s a real life scene. They don’t have to play to a fourth wall. You can play a whole scene. It’s not like television where you have to just look at one camera position at a time. So, actually, that is very familiar to actors with any sort of training.
What we’ve tended to find, I think, in casting and at Side with game directing, is that theatre actors often land the roles whereas TV actors, maybe because they’re very used to it being quite small and in the eyes, maybe are not quite as expressive with their voice always, and not as likely, interestingly enough, to land them. Obviously many actors work in all the forms, like John does. But with young actors, the ones that are kind of theatre savvy, and musical theatre – in fact, musicians as well because they have that musicality – tend to be the ones that find the form easier to slot into, don’t they?
MARTIN
Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of those things that, you know, the musical background that I think sometimes helps in terms of accents and hearing a specific sort of thing. And the theatre actors are much… I mean from a director’s point of view, you find it easier, I think, to work with, just because they’ve got that certain training and language that you’re able to use.
KATE
And, like John says, that sense of play and improvisation, you know. Any young actor knows about improvising and imagination. That is absolutely what the games industry needs, whether you’re in a performance capture studio or a voice over studio. That’s all you need.
I have not yet met an actor who has not loved working in games.
JOHN
No, no, never.
MARTIN
You described it before with performance capture; it’s almost like you’re in the rehearsal room, because you’re stripping everything away that an actor’s… like a set, and a costume, and all those kind of things, and everything is in their imagination, and it must be really fun to just build it all.
JOHN
It’s incredible. My first mocap was like you described. We kinda “Where’s the camera?” and they just went (motions) “It’s there”, and we were “Oh. What do we do?” “Just do the scene. Let’s work this in.” “Oh!” Then you kinda went “OK, this is… free!”
When you’re used to having a camera in your face, you learn to do that. But when you see it’s all around you, you’ve got the 360, everything, you’ve got the suit on; when you know that if you turn you’re still going to be captured, you’re not playing to an audience, you’re not playing to a camera, you’re just playing the scene. And that’s where it gets… It is freeing. Totally freeing.
HOW EASY IS IT TO BREAK INTO GAMES?
KATE
Easy, actually. We’ve been very much keen to stress at Side that you don’t have to be an experienced games actor to audition for a game. And I’ve had many, many mocap shoots with full casts of actors who’ve never done a game before, and it really doesn’t take very long to get them familiar with… you know. Feels a little exposing at first, I’m sure, being in a skin-tight body suit.
JOHN
My best look!
KATE
Yeah! But once they’ve got over that, and they’ve all had a sneaky side look at each other’s bodies, it’s fine.
(General laughter)
JOHN
That never, never happens!
(Laughter)
MARTIN
Didn’t know about that, did you?!
(Laughter)
KATE
So, yeah, actually, it’s not difficult.
There’s a sort of myth around the industry, I think as well, that you’ve got to be a ‘games actor’. It’s nonsense. We’re always saying, “No. You’ve got to be a good actor.” You know, it’s as outdated as saying “Oh, you’re a radio actor”, or “Oh you’re a theatre actor”. No. An actor is an actor.
ARE DRAMA SCHOOLS EMBRACING TRAINING FOR THE VIDEO GAMES INDUSTRY?
KATE
Yes, drama schools very much are starting to embrace it. I’ve been working with LAMDA for several years now, going in and doing masterclasses in acting for games. Also the Drama Studio for several years, Guild Hall I did a whole term with them, and RADA want to start doing it as well. They’ve done little bits and bobs, but they haven’t started fully yet, but they’re going to.
In terms of what I tend to go in and do is anything from a masterclass that looks at the basics of acting for games – going through what a voice over might entail; in terms of what a cutscene is; what barks are; what the different demands of a voice over job on a game and how to prepare for them; how to technically save your voice; how to know what’s a useful note and what isn’t, because there’s still situations where there’s not necessarily somebody that’s going to have their back in the room. So I go through those sorts of things for them. And also a performance capture sort of run down - about what the suit is; what ROMs are; what a T-pose, and A-pose is. All those kind of things. I go through examples of work and explore the work with them.
And then, when I’ve worked on more extensive courses, like at Guild Hall, we’ve been able to really explore all those different aspects over a few months.
WHAT IS THE CRAFT OF WORKING IN GAMES?
JOHN
The craft is going, like you say as well, I have to be this person, and know that I can’t be the same, I’m gonna have to be a different character in the next scene. So being able to jump into another character on the same day is… that for me is the best thing. That’s just playing.
KATE
Because I direct across different genres – I direct theatre and games and television – for me I do the same job. I’m all about the text comes first, tell the story, help the actors to be the best they can be to make that writer’s words sing. That fundamentally is all my job is. Whether that’s the stage, or a game, or television.
Obviously, the medium changes massively whether I’m looking through a conventional camera and looking at the picture as well, but it’s all about making sure that that clarity is there, and that there’s a clear story arc, and that there’s truth, and that there’s a kind of muddy fallibility. I never want clean lines, really. Not really interested in that. But that’s also subjective to me, you know. All directors are going to be slightly different.
So I think… One thing that is specific to games, perhaps more than the other two forms, is that I have to work very, very quickly, and so do the actors. So making sure that I’m succinct and as eloquent as I can be about a note, because we haven’t got time in the booth for me to wax lyrical about something.
Translating is the word I would use as well in terms of my role between the game developer and the performers, because… Really, really basic example is a game developer will often say… let’s say John’s in the booth and he’s playing Dandelion in The Witcher. He’s not playing Geralt, who’s the player character. The developer will often say “What you’re doing at this point is you’re charging through the field and you’re going to meet up with Dandelion.” I’m like, “Woah, woah, woah. That’s not what he’s doing (John). That’s what Geralt’s doing.” Because a game developer will say ‘you’ to mean ‘the player’. So even at a really, really basic level, that can be very confusing for an actor, especially if they haven’t done a game before, because they might be playing the antagonist to the ‘you’. So, yes, translating does very much come into it, and trying to articulate what the developer wants, and often using a different language than the developer has used to explain it to me because the language they’ve used is not as actor-friendly as the language I can hopefully use.
I should actually qualify – some game developers are obviously brilliant developers, so it varies. But just simple things, like actors learning, if they’re speaking to a crowd, to ask the question, “Is that crowd four people, or is it four hundred people?” Because that is a big difference to how they should perform it. And those are exactly the sort of things that might not be readily given to the actor without the actor knowing to ask those sort of questions. So to contextualise the world that they are in and the exact line, and to make sure they’re truthful to that environment and that moment, and the urgency or not of the situation, yeah. All of that stuff’s important for them to think about.
WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU SAY TO ACTORS IN TRAINING OR NEWLY QUALIFIED?
JOHN
I do envy them, because it’s just going at the speed of light. I mean, the changes in the industry and they way that the performance capture nowadays. The emotion that you get in the faces when you see a close-up in a… It’s incredible.
I wanna say, it’s not all sweetness and light, you know. There have been sessions here where I’ve wanted to cry, you know, because you’re not only working with, say, Kate, you’re working with a client who may be eight time zones away who just isn’t getting what they want, and there’s a disconnect and everyone’s trying. So it can be seriously tough.
MARTIN
Obviously, every job is different. The client requirements are different, there are different sorts of briefs. Obviously there’s performance capture, there’s voice only, there are lots of different types of games castings. I think, when it comes to VO casting, it’s down to how engaging the voice is, how good an actor they are, and how well I think they’re going to fit into that world.
It’s something that I get asked quite a bit about – “Oh, I haven’t got a games reel. Do I have to make one?” And it’s one of those things that I always think not necessarily, really. There are obviously certain types of games where that’s going to be if I can hear a certain thing in a games reel then sure, but it’s definitely not essential, because if I can hear a good actor doing an audiobook read or a narrative read, that’s where I’ll go. That’s how I’ll gauge how suitable they are for a particular project.
KATE
And you’ll look at normal TV reels, won’t you?
MARTIN
Yeah, absolutely. TV reels, any kind of reels. It’s interesting, though, with the drama schools. Quite a lot of them are coming out with voice reels and stuff like that now that when I first started casting on stuff, that wasn’t the case. So I think that shows it’s being taken as a viable thing now that they’re going to be doing audiobooks, games, all of that stuff where they utilise their voice. So it’s really important.
KATE
I think the drama schools need to bring people in from the industry because, obviously, it’s a relatively new form and it’s a change. It’s evolving and changing so much that, every time I’m on a performance capture shoot or something, that technology will be different. So I suspect that it would be a lot of engagement with the industry, bringing in people that are… people like Martin, directors, performers, you know, mocap studio managers, to talk and workshop those sorts of sides of things. But also to engage with dramatic performance through voice and making sure that that’s very familiar to the actors.
JOHN
That’s, that’s such a good shout. I mean, it is concentrating on the voice for games. It is like when actors will put their voice wherever it needs to be, whether it’s be the back of the house or down a microphone, or think about the person listening, we do that. But, absolutely, if I go in and go to drama schools and I teach them about audition preparation, or being in the room, or networking, or performance, you know, it is the same thing – going in and saying just be prepared. Because they’re going to come out into the big wide world of casting and they need to be prepared, and it’s all about knowing what you guys are looking for.
KATE
The practical stuff too – what is an NDA, why would you be asked to sign it? All of those things, I think, can be something actors come out of training and have no idea what that all is.
JOHN
I’ve made a boo-boo and I’d never make another boo-boo! It was pretty… It was, you know. And I didn’t, didn’t mention anything really good, but I did kind of cryptic, and I was like “No-one’s gonna know” and I was like “Oh my God…!” Got an email from Side, and I was like “I’ll take it down!”, and then it was in the news. It was in the gaming news, and I thought “Ohhhhh!”. But thank God I wasn’t the only person that week that had done it.
KATE
And working with range, because games don’t cast… Or they do cast a role, but they cast you for the game. So an actor can be booked on a game and play many, many roles, and I think that can be a shock to many young actors. So, dexterity with the voice and be able to, as John said, leap in, use your imagination, not hold yourself back, and come out with all sorts of different characters is very useful. Also, accents. Very useful with… the fashion is very much to try and cast native, isn’t it, a native accent if it’s a main role, but because you might play loads of other roles, if there’s an actor who has a native accent, like John does, but can also say at the end and we go “Oh, we’ve also got an Irish gang and a Cockney gang, and can you do any of those?” An actor that goes “Yeah, actually I can. I’m not great, but if there’s only three lines here and there I’ll be absolutely fine, and just give me a minute”, that is very useful. So, lots of work with dialects I’d say was important too.
MARTIN
Yeah, and just coming out with that material available, and a range of stuff, as Kate said, it’s really important just because if I can’t hear it then I won’t be casting it. Last year we actually employed around 600 unique actors. So there’s obviously a lot of engagement and employment within the games industry. It’s a huge employer, and it’s just growing all the time.
NARRATOR
Motion and performance capture in film and television is well known, while virtual reality films and augmented reality concerts and performances are becoming more common.However, we wanted to explore the use of technology more often associated with games at the cutting edge of theatre. Across from the Old Vic and a stone’s throw from the Young, we talked to the founder of the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio.
Participant
Tobey Coffey (Head of Digital Development, National Theatre)I’m Toby Coffey, Head of Digital Development at the National Theatre, where we set up the Immersive Storytelling Studio.
My undergraduate degree was in psychology, human computer
interaction and artificial intelligence. I did a dissertation in 1994 about how
in the future we would be able to use virtual reality to rehabilitate offenders and treat people with certain cognitive issues, for example. Making VR now is a relevance that I didn’t see coming at that point in time.I set up and ran a design and marketing agency and did a lot of work with the Arts. I came down to London and signed up to come to the National Theatre for 12 months just to see how it was, and then that was 13 and a half years ago.
WHAT WAS THE GENESIS OF THE IMMERSIVE STORYTELLING STUDIO?
Rufus Norris, who’s the Artistic Director, and Lisa Burger, who’s the Executive Director, started their tenure in 2015. Lisa had been a mentor of mine for since I’ve been here. Rufus was new. He was doing lots of meetings with lots of people to see what their objectives for their areas were. In that meeting I showed him a 360˚ film and he was really, really compelled. He just said “Look, you don’t know where this is going, I don’t know where this is going, but the potential for dramatic storytelling is really, really significant. We need to find what it means to us, what we can do with it, but also how the craft of theatre influences work generally to be made in this way.” So that very much helped recognise that this was a priority for us going forward.
We had a number of projects that we were therefore developing in this area. One of them was Wonder.land, but it became apparent that actually when we were talking to externally, whether they were investors or other partners, to talk about 5 to 10 projects that are all working with different types of immersive technology and quite cutting edge, it’s all slightly intangible in a way because there are so many points that people don’t entirely understand. So we decided to wrap that strand of work up as a studio, and call it the Immersive Storytelling Studio. If you tell people “We’ve set up the Immersive Storytelling Studio” they go “Oh, alright, cool!” There’s no more information in there, they think they understand what it’s going to be.
At that point in time, we got the physical studio which is 8 shipping containers welded together in the car park of the (National Theatre) Studio, our new work department. Which feels like a very appropriate place for us to be, because we’ve got the independence of ourselves as a studio, but we’ve got the relationship and incredible support of the main organisation.
When people ask us what our strategy is, and how you start to devise a plan for something like the studio, the first thing is that our strategy is defined by the organisation’s strategy. We’re not some curveball off doing its own thing. Everybody recognises, yes, we are a new studio, but the work that we are doing is in line with the ambitions of the organisation; which is to make incredible theatre which is relevant for everybody, and to bring in new audiences and to push the potential of what theatre can do.
HOW DO THE PROFESSIONALS YOU WORK WITH REACT TO THE TECHNOLOGY INHERENT IN WHAT THE STUDIO PRODUCES?
Actors, writers, directors, designers, everybody has been incredibly excited to work in this area with us. I quite often get people coming to say “Can we get involved? Is there something I can do?”
I find very much that creatives who have been schooled in theatre are very adaptable to the form because, again, writers, directors, designers, performers, choreographers, everyone recognises and has been trained to work in an area whereby your audience are not all in the same position, they can be in a complete variety of places, they’ve got the freedom to look wherever they want to look. It’s the craft of direction and everything else that gets them to see the performance you want them to see. That’s a little closer to, kind of, VR in a way than traditional film which is beautifully crafted around the frame and edit.
There’s been a kind of natural lead, I would say, of people in theatre coming to it (the studio) to be involved in projects. I think it depends what the technology you’re working with, you know; something like cinematic VR, for example. That’s much closer to a normal performance. If you’ve got actresses working in motion capture suits for a live animation then there are new skills needed to learn there. It’s like puppetry, in a way; you need to learn how to manipulate the puppets to do what you want them to do. There are certain things you will find you need to change, the way you might ordinarily do something, to get the effect you actually want on screen or in the headset.
Once people have got over the kind of initial ‘onboarding’ – such a techy word – become familiar with what the potential, the opportunity is then ‘freeing’ is definitely a word. It was almost standard practice that we would bring in a writer or a director and show them some work, and either they’d go quiet for a period of time, or they’d just start to talking for a period of time but, one way or another, it was that freedom of the brain and they were like “We can do this. We can do this! We can do this!!” which is great. That’s the kind of enthusiasm that you want.
What we do as a studio is we bring those artists together with creative technologists, people who understand the art form as much as they understand the technology, and then work out how we can develop new forms of performance storytelling and audience experience. What we do isn’t blue-sky research. We take managed risks in certain areas of technology and performance, and that’s the framework we work within. But that in itself is incredibly liberating for a creative.
WHAT DO YOUR TECHNICAL PARTMNERS TAKE FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH THE STUDIO?
We’ve got a variety of different partners, and different types of partners. We work with Accenture, who are responsible for innovation at the NT, but also very specifically support the studio. They worked with us on All Kinds of Limbo, which is the communal VR piece that we have on at the moment. It’s a communal experience for up to 20 people using mobile headsets. So they developed a tracking system that basically allows the system and therefore audiences to know where all the members of the audience are. It’s a room-scale experience; you move around. We couldn’t have done that project without them but, also, it felt like it was a very symbiotic kind of relationship.
Then we’ve got other creative technologists who purely work in creative industries all the time. They are very, very good at working in the way that we do. Sometimes we might start a project not knowing what the end solution is going to be, but that’s ok because you know you’re in the room with the right people, and they will be able to help you realise what it is you need to do. We always seem to get feedback that these are really interesting projects and therefore it’s great for people to kind of do that kind of thing. It’s very much the case that each project that we do is completely new and is a step on from what’s been done before.
TALK A LITTLE ABOUT EACH OF THE PROJECTS THE STUDIO HAS PRESENTED.
When we did our installation for Wonder.land, which also had a VR component, the brief was to create a space that sat between Tracy Emmins’ bed and an 80’s games arcade, which it did. It actually had a bed in the middle of it because it was to look like Ali, her bedroom in the show. Over 90,000 people did the VR in 5 months, which is just way above what we expected.
The next project that we did, which was a cinematic documentary about a 22 year old Sudanese refugee in the Calais jungle, that worked not to those kind of audience numbers, but really kind of did the job in helping people understand the perspective of what it would be like to be in those conditions, and the circumstances that you get there in the first place. Having conversations where we’re showing people at events and somebody works at a particular council, for example, and says “Please, can I show this to the people who are responsible for these kind of issues in our local council? They need to see this because they don’t understand. They don’t have this perspective.“ To be able to be creating content that lands the message that you’re trying to land so clearly was very rewarding.
Draw Me Close, it came from a workshop that we did with the National Film Board of Canada, and Jordan Tannehill is the writer director. What he decided to do is to create a memoir about the relationship between him and his mother. You are Jordan in this encounter. His mother is unfortunately terminally ill with stage 4 cancer. Although it’s not a cancer piece, it is a very strong part of the story.
What happens when you go to the performance is you take off your shoes, you’re taken into a quiet space, and then you have a headset put on and speakers that’s kind of like a collar that goes around. Inside the headset it’s a complete blank canvas. Then lines start to appear, and it becomes an illustration of the house that Jordan lived in when he was 5 years old. You’re stood on the path in front of the front door, and he’s narrating over it, some more contextual information. Obviously, you can look around and see the garden. Then he says “Come on. Let’s go in.” And when you look to the illustration, you can see an illustrated door handle in front of you. When you reach out, there’s actually a physical door handle there.
When you open the door you walk into the living room and you’re living in a live illustrated world. It’s got physical props to reinforce what you’re seeing. So as you go into the living room, you then feel the pile of the carpet under your feet, which is incredibly important; and I didn’t realise that, you know, at the very beginning when we were doing the tech rider for what we were going to need. Then all of a sudden we were like, we need a 10 meter by 10 meter pristine white carpet.
You walk around the living room, he says there’s the National Geographic, there’s the telly, and then Mum comes home from work. The reason Mum exists visually is that there’s an actress in a motion capture suit in the space with you who’s playing the role of Mother. So if the actress does that in real life, then the illustrated Mother does that in VR.
Mum does what any mum would do when you come home to your 5-year-old kid. She comes in and gives you a hug. Because you’re 5-year-old Jordan at this point. So you see the illustrated Mother coming in and then you feel the physical hug itself. And that’s what I call the Holy Shit Moment. You see it in body language more than anything else; the audience realising what this experience actually is.
And then she says “God, Jordan, your feet really stink. Go and open the window.” As you look over, there’s a sash window. You go over and open the window. The soundscape changes, because you can hear outside coming in, and people put their head outside to look around, and they (the audience) talk about the breeze. But there is no breeze.
That’s something that we’ve found quite consistently as people fill that sensory gap in, they expect to feel a breeze and therefore the brain tells them that they’re feeling a breeze, but there isn’t actually one there.
You spend an evening with Mum at that point in time. There’s live drawing; you draw with Mum on the floor, etc, and then at the end of that evening the scene changes – the living room draws out and your bedroom draws in and she takes you to bed and she tucks you into bed, which again is another moment where people are, like, “The last time I got tucked into bed was, you know, 40 years ago”.
People are very, very moved by the experience. In Tribeca (Film Festival), which was just the six minute version I, as a means of kind of to start a cathartic conversation if that’s what somebody wanted, I just said, you know, “When was the last time you were tucked into bed?”, because that’s where the experience ends. Which actually turned out not to be the best question because quite a few men said “I was never tucked into bed as a child.” You realise you just added another layer on to what their experience was.
Seeing the evolution of that, Jordan wrote in the caregiving more into the actual overall show itself when we did the latest version at the Young Vic, and that really seems to work. That project is very significant, I think, in terms of how audiences respond to that type of work and, actually, we did some research as well with i2 (media research limited) and they came back. One of the things was that 94% of people that were surveyed said that Draw Me Close had increased their expectations of what theatre could do. So, as a feedback on a studio which is looking at how we push theatre in new directions, bringing new people in, is a great thing to hear.
The most recent, we’ve got All Kinds of Limbo. You’re in the performance space with a volumetrically captured performer, and an orchestra. We very much wanted to rely on traditional aspects of performance, and the ceremony of performance, so we’ve changed the Wolfson Gallery into two performance spaces. Those have performance times on the hour, at 20 past, 20 to (the hour). It’s a ticketed event, there’s no late entry. You all do the experience together, start at exactly the same time. When you put the headset on you hear the orchestra warming up in the background.
I very much wanted people to feel like they’d been to a performance as much as they’d seen a piece of VR, or experienced a piece of VR. First of all, it’s a great exercise in choreography, because the performer moves to different points in the space and the audience very much follow where the performer is. It’s very common that people applaud at the end as you would do in a normal performance, which is great.
Quite a few couples when they did the experience together will hold hands, or have their arms around each other, or actually properly dance with each other. There was a couple who started holding hands, had their arms around each other, then went in for a ‘slowy’, as in face-to-face, at which point the headsets bashed into each other. I was like, this is not a problem that I saw coming, but it’s a really interesting one.
One of the problems that VR struggles with at this point in time, in 2019, is the isolating nature of it, and actually to be able to deliver a communal experience, in which people actually do normal forms of kind of intimacy or interaction is again a very interesting provocation. How do we take that back to the creative teams that we’ve been talking to over the past couple of years and say “Ok, knowing that this is a possibility, how absorb that into the things we can do as a storytelling kind of ambition, and how do we use that appropriately. And everything is used appropriately. Tech or interaction always has to justify its place. It can never be there as a gimmick, because I think that never works.
WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE FUTURE FOR THE STUDIO?
In the next two to three years, what you will see and what we are working on are how we create mixed reality or virtual reality shows on a sustainable level. So, for example, I’ve established a producer-led strand more recently which says, ok, if we say we want to have a show which will have a cast of fine, an audience of 50 to 75, it’s mixed reality or virtual reality, and it’s an hour long, such that we might run it six times a day, and it needs to be commercially sustainable, what does the performance model look like? What does the technical infrastructure look like for that? What is the commercial for that? Let’s establish all those as kind of templates, in a way, such that the work that we’re doing in the artist-led strand, we can start to bleed that over into that more formal structure, which creatives are really keen to do. Freedom is one thing, but also having quite clear parameters about what you’re designing to, or creating for is also really helpful.
I think we, like, there’s genre of work that will be developed, a new genre of work that will developed by the technology and the immersion have been considered right at the very beginning, in the same way that the writing and directing was, so it’s not something that’s brought in further down the line, it’s actually been part of the divisive process, advising process at at the very beginning; and for me that’s a new genre of work.
None of this is a suggestion that this is a replacement of any form of theatre at all. It’s a new type of theatre. So I would call that full immersive staging.
Then there is how you use, in the way that we have done for thousands of years, technology in existing theatre spaces. We’re all completely au fait with projection mapping now, and how that gets used in shows and stuff. There will be experiences in the not too distant future where you’ve got an auditorium of people with mixed reality headsets on, or where the experience is facilitated by new technologies. We did have a request from a director and a designer last year, I think, to stage an augmented reality show, but we all felt that the technology wasn’t ready. We hadn’t had enough experience as how to create the right audience experience, something like that. You know; how is that experience different for the person at the back of the circle versus in the middle of the stalls? You know, there’s a lot of experimental work that needs to be done there to deliver a really good audience experience. So we know that stuff’s coming at some point, but it should come with the right level of creative development behind it.
So I think there’s work we will devise right from the very beginning, then there’s how we kind of augment an existing venue, a show in an existing venue. I think very much that other type of work quite often will need its own found space. I talk quite a lot about venues of the future as much as performance of the future.
And then the third strand which is further away – I think that’s more 10 to 15, even 20 years – is the mechanisms of capture that are becoming available. Actually to have life-sized volumetric capture in a performance is quite significant in terms of what we’ve got in All Kinds of Limbo. It was part of, I think, of the Japanese Olympic bid they said, which was never going to happen. They were going to capture entire stadiums and then rebroadcast the stadium to other stadia around the world. So people in Mexico would be watching a holographic projection of the stadium in Japan.
That is definitely an area of direction of where we’re going. At that point in time, the cameras to do that didn’t even exist, but they are now being developed. And so the potential for that type of large-scale holographic, life-sized broadcast is the bigger picture further down the line, I think.
NARRATOR
Over the past 40 years, the games industry – both within this country and globally – has grown into a multi-billion dollar business.Annually, it employs many thousands of actors, and this number can only rise as the technology continues to grow and develop.
Technology previously only associated with video games is now being used in film, television, and in the theatre. Working in games gives actors early and regular exposure to that technology.
Drama schools across the UK have already recognised the games industry for what it is – one of the largest employers of acting talent.
Students need to be prepared by their drama schools for work in this sector. Any drama school that fails to provide the relevant training will be left behind.
This is no longer a choice.
It’s time, dare I say it, to get with the games.
CREDITS
In association with
Royal Conservatoire Scotland
Special Thanks to
Side Global
National Theatre
Tamsin Davidson
BMus (perf) R.S.A.M.D. 94—99
Featuring
Andy Payne, OBE
Sini Downing
Martin Vaughan, CDG
Kate Saxon
John Schwab
Toby Coffey
Conceived, produced and filmed by
Iain Lowson
Edited by
Slink Jadranko
with Iain Lowson
Music by
Eric Skiff
We’re the Resistors
HHavok
Resistor Anthems - Available at http://EricSkiff.com/music
Games Featured
(All footage is copyright their respective Developer & Publisher)
Space Invaders - Taito
World of Warcraft - Blizzard Entertainment
Fortnite - Epic Games
Candy Crush - King
Sea of Thieves - Rare, Microsoft Studios
Treasure Island Dizzy - Oliver Twins, Codemasters
Contra - Konami
R-Type - Irem
Asphalt 9 - Gameloft Barcelona
Blood & Truth - Sony Interactive Entertainment, London
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - CD Projekt Red
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture - The Chinese Room & SCE
Dragon Quest VIII - Level 5, Square Enix
Heavenly Sword - Ninja Theory, SCE
Alien: Isolation - Creative Assembly, Sega
Dear Esther - The Chinese Room
What Remains of Edith Finch - Giant Sparrow, Annapurna Interactive
Divinity: Dragon Commander - Larion Studios
Sword Coast Legends - n-Space, Digital Extremes
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey - Ubisoft Quebec, Ubisoft
Star Wars Battlefront II - EA Dice
James Bond 007: Bloodstone - Bizarre Creations, Activision
Titanfall 2 - Respawn Interactive, EA
Crysis 3 - Crytek, EA
Star Citizen - Cloud Imperium Games
Elite - David Braben & Ian Bell, Acornsoft
Elite Dangerous - Frontier Developments
Horizon Zero Dawn - Guerrilla Games, Sony Interactive Entertainment
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Rockstar Games
Man of Medan - Supermassive Games, Bandai Namco Entertainment
Behind the Scenes Footage (NOTE: links here take you to the online videos from which footage was borrowed)
Star Wars Battlefront II - Lucasfilm, EA Dice
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey - Ubisoft
Titanfall 2 - Respawn Interactive, EA (film by mocap director and performer Mohammad Alavi)
Crysis 3 - Crytek, EA
Star Citizen - Cloud Imperium Games
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens - ILM Showreel - Lucasfilm
Aamir, Wonder.Land, Draw Me Close, All Kinds of Limbo
National Theatre, Immersive Storytelling Studio
Eastenders, Dark Mon£y, Call the Midwife - BBC
Kirari! - NTT R&D demo
E3 footage filmed by Robert Wildermann
Asphalt 9 filmed by Gizmo Times
James Bond: Bloodstone filmed by Spottingames
Thanks to GMB Tech
Extra special thanks to
Sini Downing (Side)
Katie Marsh (National Theatre)
Clarence Tan (National Theatre)
Hilary Jones (RCS)
Jamie Mackay (RCS)
Filmed on
Samsung Galaxy S9+
Canon EOS 1100D
Lighting
Neewer LED panels
Audio recorded on
Zoom H1 & H5n, Behringer Mics
Edited on Adobe CC Pro Tools
Copyright Iain Lowson 2019
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