IN2010 – Concept to Screen

Interactive Exchange 2010 brought in many experts from different industries to talk about how to bring franchises from one medium to another. For this panel, the assembly of Jade Raymond, Studio Director for Ubisoft Toronto (Assassin’s Creed), Kevin Ping Chang, Production Executive for Misher Films (upcoming Shadow of the Colossus movie), Nick di Maggio, Committee Member of the British Sound and Television Society, and Jason Della Rocca, Senior Consultant for Perimeter Partners, give some helpful advice and talk about their past cross-medium projects.

Raymond explains that they were focused on the meta story for Assassin’s Creed. As they were unsure if they would get funding for a second game, much less comic books and movies, they were trying to create a world that would not be tied too tightly to one character or setting. She advises that it’s wisest to focus on trying to be successful in one medium by creating a compelling world and compelling themes. In that way, creators allow their property to be expanded upon in other media. It would be a huge investment to try to start out across media, so focusing on one, especially the inexpensive graphic novels, is a fantastic idea. The panel gave the example of the Scott Pilgrim series, which started out as cheaply made graphic novels and was then turned into a movie and a game.

For Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, Raymond reveals that the whole thing was done with the actors in front of a green screen and they put in the background later. But perhaps even more interestingly, they projected the game scenes directly onto the stage as markers, saving them time from having to restage each set. The whole Lineage experience and the acquisition of visual effects studio Hybride left Ubisoft with an increased quality in acting and costumes that then made it back into their games.

What else could lead to successful transmedia adaptations? Ping Chang believes that an early collaboration between the game studio and the movie studio is always helpful. On Avatar, James Cameron believed in the video game and collaborated early on with Ubisoft, which gave them a two year window to finish the game – double the usual amount of time for a movie adaptation. For example, the game development team needed a vehicle so the Avatar movie artists actually designed one that would fit into Pandora for them. And as a bonus, the vehicle made it into the movie!

Some other advice from the panel included that it is important to understand what you’re doing by expanding your property onto another medium – are you promoting the primary product or widening your demographic? It is also important to have the entire team engaged and excited about the intellectual property or they won’t do a good job of adapting it. If you’re looking to get into this business, the panel agrees that the industry is lacking people who understands all the media. They are growing and coming into the decision making positions now, but it used to be that the bigwigs in film did not understand video games and vice versa.

An interesting thing that happened during the audience Q&A is that Dennis Dyack, Founder of Silicon Knights (Eternal Darkness, Too Human), brought up that he could not think of a single successful transmedia project. He discounted Batman: Arkham Asylum as an example as it was a completely independent project that happened to be good. Raymond then dropped the gloves and jerseyed Dyack, and they both got five minutes for fighting. Okay, that last thing completely did not happen. Despite Dyack’s misgivings though, Ping Chang also agrees with Raymond that Batman is a good example of a transmedia property.

We catch Kevin Ping Chang later for an interview about the Shadow of the Colossus movie and we listen to what Dennis Dyack on his own panel, so stay tuned!