Content Convergence - The Hollywood Take

Rosanna Sun from Velvetelvis Studios has just completed her conference speech at EIEF 2006. Rosanna was in Edinburgh to talk about production convergence. To those who are wondering what on earth that means, on a basic level it involves working with an I.P, where she gives the Matrix as an example, and blending both the production of the movie and the game at the same time. Rosanna claims that this keeps prices down, means you can dovetail release dates and will hopefully give games more Hollywood glamour. To date there haven't been any great examples of a movie that has made a great videogame, which Rosanna does agree with to a certain extent.

Velvetelvis was formed three years after Rosanna's work on the Matrix. She initially wanted to create a group to work together on the next Matrx game but it all fell apart. In the last year and a half they've had a broad range of enquiries from major movie studios to create better games and movie directors and seeking out advice on how to best portray their films in a game and to give them that Hollywood feel. get their products into games. More recently Stephen Spielberg called Veltvetelvis and wants to create a game that will blow us away. Spielberg is involved with both EA and Vivendi Universal so we'd guess that it's one of these two companies that will be involved. Unfortunately, Rosanna was tightly lipped on the Spielberg game, but she's spent many a hour discussing the project with the movie legend and is extremely excited about the project.

The conference was a great chance for Rosanna to answer some rather tricky questions about why she has created this company and her vision for the future.

Short Q&A

You were a film producer, how did you get into videogames?

I was working on the Matrix sequels and was neotiating cast contracts and zero-g testing. In 2000 I was handed a script to produce a videgame alongside the Matrix films. The wanted it to be treated like a third film with actors doing the motion capture and the crew actually doing the in-game stunts. [advert]

Warner Bros. wanted to blend the all of the Matrix films titles and comics into the videogame which was a huge challenge and an eye opener.

What gaming experience did the movie production team have?
In-between takes they were playing Halo and were huge game fans before they got involved in the creative parts of videogame design.

Did working with both a game's team and movie result in a clash of cultures ?

Games have a very different schedule to films and there were a number of arguments and a lot of compromises which actually ended up in us saving money in some of the visual effects. From a creative standpoint it became a creative centre and working closely with both the game studio and movie designers enhanced the creative process.

As well as helping game developers to give their games that Hollywood feel, Velvetelvis are also planning on moving into the mobile game industry and hope to push the visual aspect of these games to the max!