Ken Thain: Lead Cinematic Designer at BioWare
Author of this post: Beth A. Dillon | About Blog Authors »
Although already well known for its dialog interaction in past role playing games, BioWare’s interactive narrative game play was upgraded by strides when it went for increasing the emphasis on designing cinematic interactive dialog in Mass Effect. This is where Ken Thain, Lead Cinematic Designer at BioWare, stepped in and got an opportunity to incorporate his past experience with making machinima into the actual core game play.
Q: First off, congratulations on taking away so many awards for Mass Effect at the 2nd Annual Elans Awards—Best Art Direction included! Just to begin, what was your role on the Mass Effect team and what did you bring to it?
A: Thank you for the congratulations. Mass Effect was a very exciting project with lots of hard work so any award it receives reflects all our efforts. My specific role on Mass Effect was as lead cinematic designer. Cinematic Design is a unique position within BioWare. We focus on supporting the writers work through in-game storytelling but do so under the considerations of game design. This mainly includes things like linear cinematics, interactive dialogs, and digital acting. We are always thinking about the player and how the story experience comes across through game play activity.
On Mass Effect, the work of the cinematic designers really came through with the interactive dialog (a big part of what we call the interactive narrative). It was an area we really took hold of and pushed to the next level. We also created a number of linear cinematics to support the story, but many of them were managed by the Cinematic Animation team so we could focus on the interactive narrative.
Q: How do you feel your background in Machinima contributes to a project?
A: Well, Machinima is a very accessible medium for storytelling. You just have to purchase a game and your potential as a storyteller is instantly available as soon as you install it. At the same time, just because it’s accessible does not necessarily make it easy. This is where passion and determination make the difference. In its basic form as a project, doing cinematic design for game development is not that much different than creating machinima. You collect in-game assets and assemble them to create a story narrative within the confines of a game engine. It’s just multitudes larger and far more complex, again, because you have a player to consider, not a captive audience.
So Machinima is about modifying a game engine to tell stories and that is essentially what I’m doing at BioWare now as a cinematic designer, except instead of modding an engine, I’m able to get support from programmers to create systems and features to make us more efficient and empowered to create content of a high quality. Although I have a more diverse background, I feel that making quality machinima is definitely an avenue for showing your potential to become a cinematic designer.
Q: Can you explain a bit about Mass Effect’s new technique in using interactive cinematics?
A: I would call it more an evolution than a new technique. Mass Effect took what BioWare games have done in the past and brought it to the next level of game play. Between many of the game design decisions such as to have fully voiced characters, including the player, male or female, the design of the dialog wheel and paraphrasing responses for a natural pacing, and having a cinematic design team that really wanted to push the cinematography and the digital acting performances past anything previously seen from BioWare, these elements came together to create a really interesting game play experience.
For me, the efforts in this area were paid off once we released the title, like in reading the feedback from some of the fans and hearing them mention how they couldn’t wait to finish a combat so they could get to the next dialog. This instantly established the interactive narrative as a full feature of the game and not just a supporting system of it being a RPG.
Q: Indeed! What was the makeup of your team and what was the pipeline process like for interactive cinematics?
A: The cinematic design team had an excellent dynamic of technical designers, a seasoned traditional film/television production crew, and machinima artists. It’s that mix of technical understanding, strong creative expression and passion for excellence that makes a great cinematic designer. We’ve been able to find people with this unique mix of talent across an interesting spread of professions and backgrounds.
The pipeline process for the interactive narrative touched upon all development disciplines including programming, animation, audio and art. It starts with the writers, goes through content creators such as art, audio, and animation, and ends with the cinematic designers putting the pieces together in-game. We constantly work with programming and the technical designers throughout production to ensure we are as productive as possible. I can’t speak highly enough of the design and digital acting teams on Mass Effect.
Q: How did these cinematics affect the overall art choices in Mass Effect (style and otherwise)?
A: The interactive dialog had a lot of impact on our cinematographic style. We had some strong technical limitations that we had to abide by since the player had choice. Not to mention we had around 20,000 lines of dialog to put into the interactive narrative context. So we focused on simple cinematic styles and techniques. Personally, I went back into earlier years of film production where these ‘traditional’ styles were well established, such as with films by Hitchcock and John Ford. We wanted to make it about the story, not about the use of the camera.
Also, because Mass Effect was such a cinematically driven game there was a lot of focus on creating great looking characters and environments. A lot of what cinematic design did looked so great because of the quality of work art put into the project. We just had to frame it nicely and put it into context.
Q: What kinds of challenges did you and your team face?
A: One major challenge was that we were designing interactive dialog scenes with the goal of having them feel like a linear cinematic story from one choice to the next. Keeping track of all those dialog branches and how they weaved in and out of each other some times boggled the mind. Having this mixed with dynamic digital acting performances when you have to account for player choice really takes some creative logic.
Q: What are you most proud of out of your work on Mass Effect?
I’m very proud of Mass Effect, period. I feel very lucky to have been a part of the development of such a cool project, especially as a cinematic designer with its focus on cinematic game play. Most of all I’m proud of the passion and dedication the cinematic design team put into this project and how much all the other teams supported us. We had a vision of what was possible for the advancing narrative of interactive storytelling within games, and we pursued it relentlessly. It doesn’t get much cooler than that.
