1. PRODUCTION
Production - Making the game, programming, acting & motion capturing, 3D animator,
artist, composer, sound engineers, lighting, level design, interface, director.
The production stage starts to kick off when the acting and motion tracking side of the
game starts taking place. The acting side isn’t a ‘by the script’ process, there was a lot of
improvisation during filming for The Last Of Us which gave the game that human touch; the
director would always do a scene multiple times until it gets the right feel to it. When the
actors finish acting out the scenes in the motion capturing suits, it gives the 3D animators
work to start getting on with. Each animator will have a part of the body to animate as the
motion tracking can only go so far; faces will be altered to show more or less emotion,
bodies will be adjusted on what they come across with in the game & etc.
Artists will be divided in to many different teams; some may be doing concept art for
people, infected or locations, some may be working on textures for the characters &
landscape. When the art and 3D images are complete it gets passed down to the level
designer which maps out where everything goes and then modifies when needed. One job
which the designer does is to balance the frame rate; too much detail from the artists and
too big on an object will cause this. Other members of the design team get involved in this
process to deal with lighting, placement and interface.
The composer came into the project in the early stages after Naughty Dog had realised a
lot of the music that related to the game was from an Argentinean composer named
‘Gustavo Santaolalla’. So they hired him from the start which worked well for Gustavo due
him liking to work from the script and to talk to the director about ideas; in an interview he
said “it kept my motivated throughout the project”. On the other side of the sound
department was the sound designers which had to create sounds for objects, characters,
weather and ext. When creating the sounds of the infected they hired a bunch of voice
actors to see if they could come up with something; both men and women created
screeches and the designers combined that with a clicking noise made with his mouth to
create the end product of the infected screech.