Moving On Up

And that's a stumbling block for sure. But it was interesting listening to Graham Lineham who, as a TV comedy writer, was having a bit of a go at script-writing and narrative in games - but as a gamer he does find that he gets emotionally attached to some of the characters he plays. So hopefully that's where we're helping to breathe life into those characters.

Most recently... although are they cutscenes or pre-rendered? Uncharted 2 looks absolutely fantastic, but that's just in the gameplay itself - the fluidity in the main character is absolutely stunning.

But where they're going with Assassin's Creed - the benchmark they're setting with that in terms of visuals... but again, stuff that's pre-rendered, is it going to look that good in-game? I'm not sure. The whole pre-rendered versus in-game cinematics has always been an interesting one. We've worked on quite a few of those where we're working on the trailer of a movie, in tandem with helping the developers make the game, and it's how the marketeers use our services on products like that.

Something like Killzone 2 had about 5000 in-game animations... about four years of work gone into that on our part. Not constantly - we'll typically see a client, over the course of a project, maybe once every couple of months. But something the length of Killzone 2, that's over a period of four years. It's a bit of a weird business in that respect.

It's difficult, because the whole casual market isn't particularly good for us, but those big-budget titles are our bread and butter. The ones that do need thousands of seconds of in-game, the ones that do need 90 minutes of cinematics - movie-length work.

I would hope not, no.

Is it plateauing? It's such a hit-driven business, and the risks and rewards are absolutely huge. The flipside to it is the tragedy, for example, of GriN this year - we did three of their games last year in Wanted, Bionic Commando and Terminator... that's twelve years of hard work down the pan in what seemed like a few short months.

It would be nice if that model could change somehow so that the twelve years of your life, your effort, isn't just suddenly wiped off the face of the map like that.

Absolutely true - it's the whole outsourcing thing. Or in any other industry we're called contractors, but for some reason the games industry has taken on that moniker...

Yes, we do take the risk out of it to some degree, and there were a few publishers buying their own motion capture equipment and taking it in-house... insourcing maybe... and I was worried about that for a while. But it's just not as straightforward as that.

Even the likes of EA - we did Potter for them last year - they've got a massive mo-cap studio in Canada, but the logistics of a team flying out there to do that when there's a service on their doorstep... that's not turned out to be as much of a threat as I thought it would be.

We're a safe pair of hands - I like to think we take the risk out of things. And the whole game-film model, the movies that we work on, typically the studio hires the VFX producer who then decides which post-production houses are going to get which shots. But they'll hire an office somewhere, be it in London, or Pinewood, or wherever, which starts off empty and then they populate it.

They hire in the cameraman, the lighters, the riggers and all the rest of it, and at the end of that process everybody disappears and that's it. A multi-million pound movie is born - but can you imagine that happening in the games industry, where you take a games publisher into an empty room and say: "In six months time the coders will be over there, the art department over there... can I have a multi-million pound contract please?" It just doesn't work like that.