Part 1 — Process
Part 2 — Exploration
Part 3 — Team
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“You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles and break through the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don’t have that kind of feeling for what it is you are doing, you’ll stop at the first giant hurdle.”
– George Lucas
Making ROME and “3 Dreams of Black” happen was a true collaborative effort from all parties involved. The team of extraordinary talent coming together functioned across the globe – Slovenia, Poland, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia as well as spread across Sweden – with Stockholm as the hub for the overall effort.
The way the team worked was almost like one big creative brain. We had daily 15-minute meetings with the core team where everyone reported their progress, their goals for the next 24 hours and most importantly, if they had any problems and in that case if they needed help.
In the beginning of the project we had nothing more than some early WebGL experiments as our building blocks. We knew very little about how far we could go. Basically we needed to create a complete technological framework to accomplish the vision that came from the director Chris Milk and the team from Google Creative Lab.
Mr Doob (Lead Developer Google Creative Lab), Aaron Koblin (Creative Director, Google Creative Lab) and Micke Emtinger (Technical Director, North Kingdom) hangin out in @Radicalmedia in LA.
Some of the first steps were to:
- Immediately visualize the vision and put it in a context of an interactive production. We had a script and nothing more and that needed to be abstracted for everyone to see in what direction we where heading.
Bartek Drozdz (developer, North Kingdom), Aaron Koblin (Creative Director, Google Creative Lab), Chris Milk, Riccardo Tagliabue (Art Director, North Kingdom) in a late night session at the North Kingdom office.
- Set up daily routines where everyone in the team met and reported their status as well as ventilated problems and asked for help by their team members. No one in the team knew everything. It was a complete collaboration where trust and respect served as the main bolts keeping the ship together.
We created a grid where all the different layers involved in creating this piece were represented. The storyline with each different chapter were represented as the X-axis with all the different production segments were lined up on the Y-axis. This way we could chapter by chapter get an overview of what each of the major production segments were supposed to be doing.
The grid served as a skeleton on which we could all focus to holistically understand what we needed to accomplish.
Storyboards and prototyping was a very important part of the process.
STICKING TO THE RULES.
Another guiding aspect in the process was one of North Kingdoms “golden rules” that helped us forward, the, somewhat obscenely labeled, “FUCK-rule”.
F stands for functionality and comes first, U stands for Usability and is second most important, C is cosmetics and gets its fair amount of attention when the two first items are covered off on and last comes K that stands for Kärlek – the Swedish word for love. There was a lot of love making in the end.
The FUCK-rule served as a great tool to prioritize and keep focus on the right things in the different steps of the process.
Embracing new technologies also means adapting to new circumstances in somewhat unfamiliar environments. This meant that the creative pipeline was a bit different from more common platforms, such as Flash where you know more what level of quality and performance is achievable.
Tech meeting January 13th, 2011. Bartek Drozdz (developer) is explaining some ideas in front of Marcus Ivarsson (Producer, North Kingdom), Sandra Nam (Google) and Ricardo Cabello (Mr Doob).
Bartek Drozdz is showing the first mock up of the “soup” made with Unity, to Chris.
We always aimed as high as possible; one thing that held us back a bit was the fine balance of amount of assets and level of detail versus GPU frame rate and overall performance. We did not only want it to look great, it needed to function too.
North Kingdom at Mirada, who would made what we called “the soup” that users would control. It’s Mathias who is sitting in the lower left corner, concentrating on his 3D.
We are proud to have been given the opportunity to be part of this and also very humble for the result. It’s astonishing to see the capabilities of true teamwork and equally as astonishing to see the immense potential of WebGL.
Get a full glimpse of the work development and prototyping and also find out what the team thought of the production right here:
Part 2 — Exploration
Part 3 — Team