Movie Makin' With The Sony San Diego Peeps

Spent the last few days in the Sony Cinematics offices in San Diego. They are the group that does most of the movies for Sony games, along with mocap, behind the scenes footage, stuff for HOME, and all kinds of other cool, hi-tech stuff that I'm not allowed to share. But they're a cool bunch and always fun to visit with.

So the crew there is handling the flicks for our latest game. And as I've said in a previous blog post, a number of issues have cropped up in the last month (budget, timing, story telling syles) that have necessitated rewrites to the script. But production is so close to starting that we figured we'd skip the rewrite script phase and jump right into storyboards, adjusting (and in some cases out and out rewriting) the story as we boarded. 

So that's what we did, and that's what I've been doing all week.

Super producer Nick Kononelos rolled white boards into his office and we had a big ol story telling/story boarding jam session as we worked thru all the shots and the story. It was fun! Check it out:

That's Tony Washington, super nice dude and he of this video clip right here. World of Warcraft and Comic Con fans may recognize super talented Tony from his super cool work on the WOW and Dragon's Lair comics, as well as the animated Ninja Turtles flick. He's also got a pretty cool audio/visual story telling world going on that he's designed called Stations Stories. To learn more about all the cool stuff he's up to, Check out his site.

And here we have uber talented Mr. Steve High. Great artist, great visual storyteller.

Check out his cool stuff here!  

Steve and Tony split up the work over the week so we could get the whole story banged out (and I still gotta go back on Monday to finish it up with them). THEN the Sony producers gotta take the new boards and run it thru the Dream Killing Machine (AKA the spreadsheet they use to estimate and calculate the budgets) and then we'll prob. have to make some more adjustments so we can afford to make these movies. And then- once that is all done (should be next week)- we can roll into production of the game's movies. Whew! 

Ok, last 2-3 days have been all story telling, now it's time- thank God- to get my ass back to the gameplay! Gotta run- great weekend ya'll....who is going to see KICK ASS?!?!? I know I am! 

Later!

David 

ps. check it out- just got tickets to these two super cool events in LA this May! 

Harrison Ford doing Q/A after a screening of Empire Strikes Back at the Arclight! And all the cash for tix goes to charity!

Kevin Smith Q/A at House of Blues in Los Angeles! 

Can't wait! May's gonna rock!