- 1 day ago
A documentary for Outcast
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🎮️
GamingTranscript
00:00In the year 2007, a team of scientists have discovered the existence of many parallel universes.
00:07A probe from Earth is soon deployed by the U.S. government to reach one of these worlds called Adelpha.
00:13Minutes after landing, an intelligent life form damages the probe.
00:17On Earth, an unforeseen backlash of energy is created by this action,
00:22and the result is a constantly growing black hole, which threatens the very existence of our planet.
00:27Cutter Slade, a U.S. Navy SEAL commander, is charged with the safety of three scientists,
00:32who have been chosen to travel to this new world.
00:36His assignment is to locate the probe and make sure the scientists complete their job in time.
00:53Now, the destiny of our planet is in his hands.
00:57The End
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01:29Excuse me, but who are you?
01:31Cutter Slade, the guy from Outkast.
01:33What are you doing here?
01:35Don't know yet.
01:37What does that mean? Are you nuts?
01:39Maybe. Ask him.
01:41I can see only you.
01:43Sorry. There, go ahead, ask him.
01:45Excuse me, sir, but what is this Outkast?
01:49Outkast is the first video game that really tries to be an interactive movie.
01:54Not only have we tried to play with movements, with shapes and animation at all levels of the game,
01:59but above all, we gave it intelligence.
02:06It's enormous. Three years of production.
02:09It's a huge budget with major goals.
02:11It's going to be a turning point in the video game industry.
02:18One of the qualities of Outkast is its visual originality,
02:21and that comes from its initial visual design,
02:24as well as from the technological constraints.
02:33Together with Frank and Yves, we wanted to give the game a richness and a depth.
02:37And that meant mixing lots of different technologies,
02:41a multidisciplinary approach.
02:44We wanted to go beyond the usual indoor scenery game,
02:50beyond games that only have walls.
02:52We wanted real landscapes.
03:00The key word for the graphic designers was realism.
03:03At the beginning, the five worlds were built with 128 different tiles,
03:07so the important thing was to link them and match them up for 3D continuity.
03:12All the technology developed for the game gives a lot of advantages for the on-screen display of fine details.
03:23We chose to go for high-quality realistic details right from the start,
03:26so we tried to vary as many things as possible to avoid tedious repetitions.
03:31The voxel technology appealed to us immediately because it would allow us to deal with almost infinite landscape complexity.
03:37We wanted a quality of rendering that wasn't available with traditional technologies.
03:41And once we put the environment and everything together, we were like,
03:44hey, that's Cutter, there he is, alive and kicking.
03:46That was the outstanding moment.
03:49In the early stages, someone was in charge of sketching out the characters on paper.
03:58I know that for Marion, for example, I had a lot of fun adding them up.
04:02I made almost 200 roughs.
04:03And it's true in the end, I was so familiar with them all, I was saying to myself, he's my child.
04:08That was really important for Outkast to have very diverse characters.
04:14We have over 65 different characters in the game.
04:17And what we've tried to do is make it so that each character interacts with the other characters as well as you.
04:24Once the character research was over, the drawings were scanned.
04:28And once that was done, the modeling artists used them to create a 3D polygonal model.
04:33In the beginning, I used splines to follow the artist's lines.
04:38Then, I use a technique that allows me to build polygons following the splines.
04:44And finally, when the modeling and the skeleton are done, we can start working on texture mapping.
04:50In fact, for some of Outkast's characters and objects, we also use bump mapping.
04:56I'll show you how it works on this t-shirt.
04:59Here's the traditional texture map.
05:02And then we add the bump.
05:05And here it is.
05:07And this technique allows us to add various information, creases on the clothes, wrinkles, muscles and so on.
05:13An important factor in the final result is animation.
05:16That's what gives this realistic aspect to the characters in the game.
05:21Now I'm dressing up for motion capture.
05:26I'm placing sensors on my body.
05:29The sensors are detected by the computer, which will translate my movements to on-screen animation.
05:36I'm really lending my muscles to Cutter.
05:46Motion capture is an important part of Outkast.
05:49It represents a total of 20 hours.
05:51I don't mean capture time, but animation time in the game.
05:54There are two other animation techniques in the game.
05:57One is the traditional keyframe animation, and the other one is procedural animation, which allows real-time modifications of the keyframed and motion-captured animation.
06:12When you're in the virtual world of Outkast, you get to meet characters with real depth.
06:17Artificial intelligence allows a codification of reactions and emotions according to given situations.
06:23That's what brings interactivity to the game.
06:26We really tried to give a social dimension to the characters.
06:30And thanks to this interactivity, we were able to build the quests in the game according to the characters.
06:36In order to complete the mission, you have to meet people, fight with them, you'll be afraid, you're going to laugh, you'll have to tell jokes.
06:45But in the end, you will find the purpose of your quest.
06:48And in fact, a video game really is a virtual quest.
06:57And so, to give the player some references, we created a strong script like in a movie.
07:02What was very important for the scenario was the meeting with Douglas Fries.
07:07He really had the cinematographical background we needed.
07:11I've got to go to a meeting now, so if that's okay, I've got to finish this.
07:20The original idea of the game was a non-linear game. We've always had that in mind.
07:25Otherwise, it was going to be just five worlds, and you went and did separate things.
07:29But we didn't have anything that linked it together, and now we do with the dramatic storyline that goes through the game.
07:35It was very helpful actually working with a team whose English is not their first language
07:40because it really helped me to focus the language down and everybody to be able to understand it.
07:45As soon as Cutter enters the world, you're not having to learn how to walk again or how to speak again.
07:51It's very comfortable.
07:53Today, Cutter's Slade is truly the most sophisticated success with respect to immersion in a completely free-flowing virtual world.
08:02Yeah, yeah, I know. Big as a house, leaps tall mountains in a single bound, blah, blah, blah.
08:12What we would like is for Cutter to be everybody's dream.
08:15I think that when he was young, he was sitting in the back of the classroom and hitting the ones in front.
08:19There are six main weapons in the game. Basically, they were all designed to be used in very different ways.
08:28Some of the gadgets we have are very fun. The invisibility is my favorite one.
08:33When a bullet whizzes past, you can really hear the sound moving with it.
08:50That's called environmental audio.
08:53Inside this house, you hear the corresponding residents.
08:58And now, if we go outside, the same sound has a different color.
09:05Frank creates the sound. I place them and eventually adapt them according to the needs of the game.
09:12There are 350 sounds in OutKast, all created in this small studio.
09:17All the voices, all the screaming, every character sound is performed by a corresponding actor.
09:41We cast female voices and male voices, tried to give them an accent, tried to make them act older, younger, etc.
09:50What are you going to do? Charge me for smoking?
09:54Cutter? Well, I reckon he's a joker.
09:57The music gives the game a real action-adventure movie side to it.
10:04So we worked with a composer and recorded the score with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.
10:09The mix of music and OutKast is a large mix, a varied mix of some classical elements, some very exotic or esoteric elements.
10:19Something esoteric is, when you're in the city world, it's sort of a Middle Eastern, very exotic sort of landscape.
10:26So the way I create an exotic landscape musically is I use an instrument called the duduk, which is an Armenian instrument.
10:35In the forest world, I use African percussion, a talking drum, djembe, African congas.
10:42In the marsh world, it's a very foggy world, so I use low woodwinds at the bottom of the register.
10:49And they're, like, way down there, just like, wow, like fog, just creating a mood that helps immediately put you in the world.
11:02Infogram's motion marketing team has been working with the development team of OutKast right from the start of production.
11:10We've started with upfront marketing, made a lot of focus groups, consumer testing,
11:15and we tried to implement the features of the game according to the results of these focus groups.
11:21The second step was working on a strategic platform worldwide.
11:26From the beginning, we knew that it would be a flagship for the group,
11:29so we've decided to aim at two targets, the hardcore gamers community and the mass market.
11:37Our objective in terms of sales is huge, and to help us and to have the territories reach this objective,
11:46we've decided to spend 3 million US dollars.
11:50OutKast will be in the forefront everywhere.
11:53Specialist magazines, cover-mounted demos, internet sites, promotions, contests.
12:00We will have a lot of trade advertising.
12:02And, last but not least, you will find OutKast also in movie theatres,
12:07which is quite exceptional for a PC game, with a 30-second commercial linked with a super Hollywoodian production.
12:20OutKast clearly illustrates high-motion's philosophy, which is to give to the audience the kind of entertainment,
12:26the kind of quality of entertainment they're used to when they read a book or go to the cinema,
12:30which means to create real scenarios, real synopsis and real characters.
12:35I want to join in the fun.
12:37But you don't have a weapon.
12:39You don't know as much about me as you think, slave.
12:42For us, the creation of characters is clearly what we wanted to explore.
12:46We felt that it is the new frontier for video game experience, and OutKast just clearly passed it.
12:52OutKast is a new game and a new style.
12:55We want video games to go one step further.
12:58The game is centered on four main axes.
13:00Beauty, wonder, realism and immersion.
13:03The overall quality of what we got in the end is well above our hopes at the start.
13:08OutKast is a super production, but it will go further.
13:12There will be a before OutKast and an after OutKast, but I do hope it will also have lots of descendants in the future.
13:18You bet!
13:25Et voila! A new entertainment concept.
13:28A lot has been said, but the mystery remains.
13:31Now, everything is in your hands, and we want you to be goddess-laid.
13:36You want me to do what?
13:40We are trying to give this character some sex appeal.
13:43Are you insane?
13:44I love it. This is great.
13:46I just can't do this. You keep smiling.
13:48Dammit, sorry.
13:49Again!
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