Streamlining Production

It's the entire time - you have to be like CNN and the Weather Channel... consistent updates. You've got to be able to sit there and make sure it works. It's one thing to plan anything on paper, but that's usually out the window in 15 minutes at the sight of the first delay. It's how you act as an operational plan to adjust to those creative chaos issues that produce effective results within game companies - how do you move to solve those problems... that makes it work.

This is exactly how we provide savings - we've worked with over 60 developers across the world who do things entirely differently. All of our processes have been proven iteratively working with everyone from people in China to people in the US.

Because there are differences, we've come to find the places where there aren't so many differences in the workflow. What we do, at the very beginning of the project, is assess how the client and external partners work internally, and look for similarities. We bring those into a pipeline that uses our methodology that we've developed over the last ten years, and structure it appropriately.

Through every production there's going to be a design and concept phase, a rough block-out phase, a texture phase, a modelling phase, an integration phase, and so on. You look at a step-phased process, with concept, production, integration, QA and QC... And it's in-between these areas that you have to manage the risk.

You can set up a schedule to cover 12 months of development knowing that the first three months are pretty much planned out - but anything beyond that is just a guess. So it's about how you manage that process - and our internal tools allow us to do that very well, because we can take metrics, we know who's creating what. It's the methodology through which we create things.

Last year we were responsible for the online internet marketing campaign for the movie Avatar - it was one of our biggest transmedia projects ever. We'd been in contact with William Morriss, 20th Century Fox and Coke Zero, and they brought us in to do the production management and creative execution.

What we did was to take the marketing plan, managed the vendors and set up the process that could take assets from the film world, the commercial television world, the game world and the social network world to create a uniquely transmedia experience. We made sure that it all worked smoothly.

And we're currently working on two projects that we'll be able to announce in the future - but it's exciting stuff. It's pretty much been a smooth process.

We went to Hollywood about a year ago, specifically to be closer to our motion picture clients, because traditionally they operate more in the transmedia space than videogames. Through this process we met with William Morris, who was working with Fox and Coke, to develop AVTR.com - which essentially became a hub for social viral media, and in which users could come and create all sorts of interesting campaign-orientated materials.

They had the idea, but they needed to have the production management and the creative execution expertise to be able to do that, and experience in the games space - to be able to put all that together.

It's often the same situation that clients in the videogames space find themselves in - they have ideas that need to get done, but they don't have experience or knowledge on how to pull it off. So we want to be able to bring that to people, to provide a solution - we understand from a technical and business perspective how to deliver results.

It's truly international - for the last two years we've had a presence in Asia, sales in the United States and Content Production in Europe. Going forward the US remains a sales location, Europe focuses on logistics and administration, while the folks in Asia will primarily be a content and IP production studio.