Lux: Tell us about the origins of the emptychambers project?

TI: The Digital Marketing and Development Director for Palm Pictures called our office in mid-July to discuss what ideas we might have for developing a marketing plan for the film 13 (Tzameti). 13 is a French film about a young man who becomes embroiled in a winding mystery that eventually results in his participation in a large-scale Russian roulette tournament.

Lux: What was the goal and creative vision in producing the website and the game?

TI: Our initial sketches were done in our "War Room" on two whiteboards. We mapped out the general flow of the site as a collaboration between myself as the "modeler" and our lead designer serving as Art Director. We wanted to present the user with something similar to the old school multimedia CD-ROM experiences. In those venerated applications you would generally be looking down at a desk on which were placed several key items. This view helps to involve the player in the environment and it's really easy to set a mood when you focus their attention on just a few items. There are scenes in the movie which serve as anchor points in the game and for this we created four distinct "scenes". Each of the scenes has a distinct mood that was achieved effortlessly using the lighting system in modo in combination with its lightning fast GI setup.

Lux: Over what time period was the site and the game produced?

TI: The project began on July 13th with a phone call, and the end-product launched on August 8th for client approval. All of the 3D models and textures were created in-house in the space of one week by myself and our lead designer. The end result is a fully playable on-line game which allows you to compete in a series of mini-games which represent that initial period of hesitation before you attempt to shoot the person standing in front of you in the back of the head. To add to the drama of simply completing on time, you might get to the end-stage of the round and find that the next chamber is empty. Some players report going as many as 10 rounds without firing a shot and it's quite frustrating. When the hammer finally falls, it's an exceptionally satisfying crunch. The assets for the game took approximately 16 hours to model and texture and another 6 hours to render and composite including moderate color adjustment in post. 

Lux: How much creative freedom did you have in producing the game and the website that hosts it?

TI: Throughout the course of the project, Coalmarch was given almost absolute creative freedom. Only two of our concepts were tabled (I'll save those for myself) and those were axed only because of time and budget constraints. The end-game has two mini-game prototypes presently with two more in a "beta" stage waiting to go live after some additional play-testing. As for the artistic content created for the project, we met all of our objectives for scope and subject matter.

Lux: How was modo employed in the project?

TI: The Advertising Director sat next to me with the scene on my Wacom Cintiq serving as a second display while I had two layouts open. On my Mac Book display I had the item view, materials list and a single perspective view for positioning objects in the scene. On the second display we had the camera view and a preview running continuously with multiple threads. The AD would say something like, "Does that hypodermic look a little fat to you right at the neck?" and I would respond by tapping the spacebar a few times, drag-selecting some polygons, and moving them right inside the layout view. Earlier this year we did a visualization project in Lightwave and this kind of functionality would have been invaluable. In that project we'd pulled in some content from a third party resource that hadn't been prepared correctly, and it was an abysmal process of rendering a frame, seeing that some surface normals were incorrect, or that there was a seam in the subdivision, having to stop everything and tell the project manager to come back in a few minutes while I worked out the kinks in modo v1. It goes without saying that during the EmptyChambers project there was a significantly diminished amount of coffee being consumed by the involved parties. We found that we just weren't waiting on the software to catch up with our creativity!

Lux: What was the clients' response to your work?

TI: The initial response from the client during production was rather humorous really. It was a mixture of "I don't know where you're taking me exactly..." with equal parts of "But I like it..." When we finally shipped the finished product over to the client for internal play-testing, we were told that people were "Picking their jaws up off the floor" and that someone "Was just yelling at the screen because their gun didn't go off." The accolades have been steady ever since, from people playing the game by stumbling onto it, or having been invited by existing players. If nothing else, everyone seems to find the experience enjoyable and we'd like to think that the scenes have just a little bit to do with that.

Lux: What was your favorite part of the project?

TI: The real joy of the project was working with materials. More than once we found that we wanted more "grit" or "more light here" and with the shader tree and the simplicity of working with gradients to drive any number of material properties, having a special effect localized into a single area was something that you could "just do", wherever and whenever you wanted.