Here we go. We might have read about you, we might have listened to interviews you’ve done in the past but chances are our readers don’t really know anything about you so it’s best to introduce yourself accordingly.
My name is Lydia Andrew and I’m the Audio Director at the Ubisoft Quebec City studio, I’ve been working in game audio for about 16 years now, I worked at EA for a while and I’ve worked at Ubisoft for six years now. I’m also coming from a background in film and television in audio, previous to joining the games industry and actually this is my fifth Assassin’s Creed that I’ve worked on.
If not mistaken, your previous major production in the franchise was Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, correct?
Yes I was Audio Director, again for Quebec City, because we were leading on Syndicate. Previously working on Assassin’s, I worked on ACIII and on Black Flag as the Audio Director for the multiplayer part of the game, which was built in France, so I was living and working in France at the Annecy Studio and then I worked on Unity on part of the game that that studio was responsible for. And then, for Syndicate, they asked me if I would move to Quebec City to work as the Audio Director for the main game, here in Quebec City for Syndicate and now for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
The way we understand it, audio wasn’t your very first focus. You had some film studies.
Yes, so I’ve always worked in sound. Ever since I started working in television, on location, and then when I working in film-based production, I’ve always worked in sound, in audio. I started working in sound on location and in television, doing things like mic operating in soap operas or in documentaries, being a sound engineer for short films, television programmes, things like that and then I went to film school to learn more about the post production sound and I was at the National Film And Television School in the UK and after that I moved into film-based production and worked in feature films and on large scale television series before moving into games. And then, out of the blue, one day I received a call from someone that used to work at EA and he asked if I’d be interested in coming in for an interview at EA, to work in the sound department there. He’d been recommended my name by someone and so I went for an interview at EA, thinking that probably I’d just work in games for a few years, see what that was like and ended up working at EA for 10 years and I’ve been at Ubisoft for 6.
Talk about one thing leading to another.
Yes, very much so.
Everything you mentioned though happened after you got your second diploma, right?
So, no, I understand the question. I did a Theatre Studies degree originally, my first degree is in Theatre Studies and Dramatic Arts but pretty much as soon as I left university I started looking for work experience in film and television because I realised I was much more interested in working behind the camera than in front of it. But what was great about my degree was it gave me really good training about working as an actor or with actors and that’s been very useful for me for my career in games because, obviously, a part of my job has me working with actors.
What we’re really interested in is what actually clicked, and how, for you to do the switch. You said that you realised at some point that you’re more interested in working behind the cameras rather than in front of them so we suppose that on a personal level, at some point, something made it all click. And we’re suckers for such details. If you don’t mind.
OK. I think, for me, there were two realisations. One was I was always interested in how things are made, how they work, how the pieces go together and so being someone working either backstage in the theatre or working behind the camera in films and television or making games has really fed into my passion for understanding how things work and for making things. Through my Theatre Studies training, part of my training was being able to create productions, working behind the scenes, working in stage management, we learnt about all areas of the theatre, it wasn’t an acting degree, it was a Theatre Studies and Dramatic Arts degree so we learnt about all areas. And also as part of my course I had the opportunity to do a film studies course at university as well. And the more I studied the more I understood how things are more and how they’re put together. That is what was really interesting to me because I’ve always been that kind of person, I like to understand the pieces and how the pieces work together. And games is a perfect place for that because you’re working with everyone who has made that project, you work with all different kinds of people. The animators, the programmers, the world builders, the character modellers, the writers, production, presentation, everything, you’re working together. So for someone who loves making things and likes to understand how they’re made this is a very obvious kind of endpoint for me, incomparison to being an actor and working on the stage. Which is a great career, a career that involves a lot of dedication and skill, but just wasn’t the right fit for me. I really really liked knowing how things were technically, how all the different principles came together to make something, so now television, film and now, ultimately, games was a career path that felt much more natural and more engaging for me.
Excellent. The next logical step in this conversation is to ask about how you understood and managed the transition going from more linear work that is television, documentaries and what have you, when you jumped to the gaming side.
So it’s true that for sound and other disciplines working in linear medium like film and in non-linear mediums like games is very different. For me, because I started in games 16 years ago it was even more different because we were telling very different stories and making very different kinds of games at that point. For example the first game I worked on was a Formula 1 racing game, so it was a very different experience to working on a film or on a television programme like Band Of Brothers which I worked on. For me, what was important when I first started in games was really understanding the context I was in. One of the reasons I decided to accept the job in games was because of the passion of the people that interviewed me. They were so passionate about what they were doing and they were so willing to share their knowledge and their information and their passion for games. It was a hard decision to move from films but I was really intrigued. I was really intrigued by how passionate those people were and, again, because I love to make things and I love to understand how things are made, it was a very intriguing opportunity for me. And so when I started working in games, what I really needed to think about was “OK, how do I work in a place where it’s not predictable what will happen next?”. We have to consider that the player has control. And, sure, in certain elements of game, we know. For instance, if you’re making a game that has a series of gates in it, you know the player has to get from A to B before they can go from B to C. So some things are predictable and we can sculpt those more but many things are really down to player choice and actually, for me, that was a really interesting challenge because it meant that you were thinking about something in a 360 way, a more holistic way. And that really appealed to how I like to work and maybe more to my personality as well. I really liked the idea of something not being fixed, of having different variations, having an element of surprise or an element of chaos or an element of minute by minute, second by second adaptation. And so I actually enjoyed that change from liner to non-linear and certainly in the kind of games I’ve worked on, that has progressed over the years and now we are very much in situation, with Odyssey, where player choice is very much at the centre of our game. And I really love that, I really love what we’ve done with really focusing on bringing the RPG elements to life in our game and giving player choice a central focus, because I love playing like that as well and it gives me the opportunity to think about and to work with my team on what all those different possibilities are, what’s important to our players, what’s important to our game and finding the best combination of those things. So it’s a really interesting opportunity and challenge.
OK. This is exactly where we were going with this. Because, obviously, jumping from a linear to a more interactive medium means there are way more variables at play that you may or may not fully control at any given moment. This kind of transition arguably applies, as a metaphor really, to how the Assassin’s Creed series has evolved over the years and especially this time around, in the case of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Of course there was a huge world you had to work with in every previous title in the franchise but it’s the first time you have some much choice. Obviously we can’t know at this point what this really amounts to, it’s too early to know, but even the simple fact that the player can choose between factions introduces way more variables, even, hopefully, in the sound department.
Yes, it’s true. Obviously this game is a very large game, very complex and because player choice is at the centre of the game, there’s a lot of things that we focused on which maybe in a more linear game or a more linear entertainment experience, you wouldn’t have. But actually those are the things that are very interesting for us because they add a lot of richness and a lot of diversity and so what we decided to do was really focus on a systemic approach to building the game. Because we knew that we couldn’t go, with sound, you know, from the first hour of gameplay to the second hour of gameplay to the third hour of gameplay and sculpt the experience in a very controlled way. We knew what we needed to do was build systems that would combine together really well so that whatever game we chose to make, whatever experience the player chose to have those systems could work well together. So, for example for the new interactive dialogues that we have in the game, where you are making choices about what you want to do, where you’re asking questions to people and getting information from people, for that we knew we wouldn’t try to somehow track-lay each of those experiences so that each voice, each sound on an animation was put there by hand. We know that we need to build a system where the voices are available to the people that are building those interactive dialogues, that the sound effects are attached to the animations so that whatever animations they choose for that dialogue the sound effects come with them. For sure if there was a very unique moment in that dialogue, like an explosion or something like that, we would add the sound onto that moment. But everything else really needed to be a system, so we built perspectives for the camera, so when the camera moves to different focal legnths or different positions, the voice would follow that. So that when the camera was very close to me the voice would be slightly louder, if the camera was a two-shot the voices would in a kind of different perspective. All of those things are things that we built as systems because we knew that building such a huge game with such huge player choice, we had to have an underlying foundation that was adaptable and very active. It couldn’t be something that was a very manual job. Because a) we would end up with a very inconsistent experience and b) we wanted to be able to iterate, so we wanted to build a system that would allow us to iterate.
And use it going forward.
Yes.
Otherwise, we suppose, you wouldn’t ever be able to ship if you had to do anything by hand.
Yes. It’s not practical. I don’t think there’s any huge AAA where they take a very manual approach to everything, because it would be impossible, but it’s also for us part of the whole approach to the project, which is, if you’re already investing in an RPG and you’re building in this huge and beautiful world with incredible animations, all these these different kinds of gameplay you can come across, all of us were looking at how to build new systems and optimise these systems to allow us to iterate to allow us to explore, to allow us to make those choices that the player will then have access to and to make a seamless experience. So I walk into a dialogue and I hear the ambiences, I hear the objects in the world around me making that sound, I go into the dialogue, they continue to make that sound with a slight mix recipe to allow the voice to really shine, then I come out of the dialogue and seamlessly I’m back into the world, with the same ambiences , the same sound, the same objects, there’s birds in the trees, there’s a dog running around in the street in front of me barking, everything feels alive and it feels seamless and that was very important to our experience.
So, the player gets to make some choices, there are branching storylines this time around, as well as multiple endings. We suppose that different player paths will end up meaning different tone in the resulting proceedings, a tone we also assume has to be somehow expressed through audio, which is maybe something that you didn’t have to worry about as much in the past. What does this mean in terms of how you approach things for the sonic stage you have to create for each case, what does it change in your procedures.
What we did was, we created a series of layers in the game. So, for example, I might say that we’re in a particular part of Greece and this particular part of Greece, during the daytime is full of nature, full of birds, there’s a river that’s running through it, there’s a small camp with some military people in it, maybe the Spartans are camped there, there’s also animals in the wild, so there might be bear, or there might be wolves or something in the wild and then, on top of that, we’ve got maybe a certain kind of quest that we’re doing or a certain kind of dialogue we’re having. So what we’re doing is, we’re constantly looking at all of these layers and how we build up this very rich kind of tapestry, this very rich series of assets that can be used in different ways at different times in the game. Depending on where we are in a quest, where we are in a story, where we are in a relationship with a certain character, depending on which location we’re in, what time of day it is, is it raining, is it windy, what kind of animals are there, what kind of people are there, is it the Spartans, is it the Athenians, is it bandits, all of those kind things, by putting all those layers in and treating them if they’re quite organic, living parts of the world, the experience from a sound point of view can change and develop as the player moves through the world. And then, when we would get into a dialogue for example, we might choose, well this dialogue is a dialogue with this character, so we have a suite of music for this character and for that character, let’s say it’s Socrates, we’ll have music that’s more positive, more upbeat, music that’s more neutral and music that’s darker, maybe a little sadder and little bit more stressful. And when we enter that dialogue with that character, we’ll be able to chose what tone of conversation this is. Is this a conversation that’s very active, happy upbeat? Is it a conversation that’s maybe darker, sadder, more stressful? And the music will reflect the action of that dialogue. So if I go into a dialogue with Socrates where he’s just talking to me and everything’s fine, maybe the more neutral piece of music plays. But then during that dialogue I make a choice. If I choose to do something that could be seen as maybe a stressful thing to do, then the more stressful music will come in at that point and support the choice I’ve made. We don’t want the player to feel there’s good and bad choices, positive and negative choices, it’s a grey area, it’s up to you, you make those choices but the music and what’s happening in the game can just help to support the storytelling. Have you chosen to do something that’s maybe a romance option? OK, we’ll give you a bit of music that makes you feel like you’ve chosen a romance option. If you’ve chosen something that’s quite active or stressful, then we can support that choice with music as well. The music helps to support the choices the player makes and certainly the sounds of the environments change. If you’re in an environment that’s military camp for example, we’ll have maybe more stressful music as you enter that camp, we’ll have feedback to the player vocally, where the player will recognise they’re in a dangerous place and they should pay attention, we will have the GUI and HUD feedback, so all of the sound is coming together to support that moment by moment gameplay and the choices the player is making. Does this help you understand it a bit more?
Yes. Assuming we’re getting this correctly, a more crude way to put it is you took your usual pipeline and made it even more modular than before to accommodate for the branching and mix and match.
Yeah, we actually developed completely new approaches and a completely new pipeline because we’d never done branching gameplay or had choices that affected the direction you would go in or the characters you might meet and the characters you might not meet so much. We really had to develop a new way of thinking and new tools and pipelines to do that, which is part of what was so exciting and interesting about the project. Because there really were big new challenges for us and it was very interesting to have something so profoundly different to work on and I think the result is definitely there. When I play, even though I’ve played the game a lot, I still really talk to people, listen to what they’re telling me, I’m thinking about the decisions I’m going to make, I’m intrigued as to what’s going to happen next. The sound and all the other elements of the game are supporting me in that journey.
We don’t really have prior experience as game testers on our end, but somehow, we feel, that this jump in complexity, we have to give it up for the audio testers. It sounds like it must be a relative nightmare to test for everything, for many many variables involved.
I think it’s true. I know it’s true that I probably haven’t seen every possible outcome. Even though I’ve been working on the game for a long time and I’ve played the game a lot, because of the order of choices I may have made, I may haven’t seen every possible combination of things that can happen. But that’s why our systems are so important. By building really good systems we support all of those options. I think I’ve seen most of them but once in a while, you know, you’ll hear a line of dialogue or get a reaction from someone that maybe you don’t remember having seen before but the team is constantly playing and we have testers embedded in our teams as well. So we’re constantly playing, our testers are constantly playing, the game testers, the development testers we have elsewhere in the world are constantly playing to highlight things to us and to help us. But it comes back to the fact that if we build strong systems and foundation, the systems adapt. So we know that we should always have a consistent and predictable experience for the player because the system we’ve built allow us to do that.
Out of curiosity do you have any testers dedicated to audio?
Inside each development team, for example in audio, world or in animation we have embedded testers that work as part of our team. So we had two audio testers on this project embedded in the team. And then there’s a much much bigger team of testers who are working in several locations around the world who are constantly testing the entire game, giving us feedback and helping us to identify issues, improve the game, improve the player experience. But yes, we have embedded testers who are within our speciality, they understand our tools and pipelines, they understand and they’re experts in audio testing.
Right. On to a a different kind of challenge then. This time you have to work with musical instruments and create music from a very particular period, even though we know very little about the music of the time. With very little information left, we know of some of the instruments that were being used back then, through their visual depiction in other kinds of artwork, but, as we understand it, we can’t really sure about what ancient Greek music was like. Meaning that you had to fill in a lot of blanks and judging by the main theme that’s already out there and has been the default choice for every trailer of the game that’s been put out so far, we think you’ve used a bunch of instruments that are essentially Greek in feel but, understandably so, not of that period. So, knowing there’s no possible way to be authentic to something that no one really knows, which is quite a different issue to have compared to earlier Assassin’s Creed titles where there was way more information tow work with, how did you approach this kind of problem?
There were a couple of things very early on in the project. Actually, again, I go back to my Theatre Studies degree, but my Theatre Studies degree came in use once more, because I did actually do a year, as part of my degree, on a track, a course that was about Greek theatre. So I had already read a lot of the ancient Greek plays and quite a lot of texts as part of my university course and had actually, during one of my summer holiday, had the opportunity to go Epidavros, go into the theatre there and kind of read and understood a bit about the performance of that time and the music of that time. So when I started this project it was a really nice moment to refresh that information and also to see what had happened in all the years since I’d left university. We did a lot of research into the music of the day, the musical instruments, obviously the pictures on vases, the pictures painted on walls that showed us the kind of instruments, and a lot of listening to music that had already been reconstructed, either by academics or by musicians in Greece, where they were trying to interpret how this kind of instrument would have sounded and how they would have used it. But, obviously, what we are doing when we’re making a game is not doing an academic study. We’re trying to create an entire world, create an entire experience and a game for the player. So we’re always looking at the combination between what kind of elements do we want to take from a time or a place, what kind of story do we want to tell and how do we do that, for example, with the music. So there’s always a combination of, maybe, certain kinds of instruments you want to use but also tempos or themes or emotions that you’re trying to get across to the player. After we’d done all our research we started to talk about certain kinds of instruments that we felt were very important in that time. The kithara, the lyre, the aulos, a few other instruments were obviously very important because we kept coming across representations of those instruments. When we were putting together the brief that we wrote to help us choose our composer, we said to them that we would like to feature a few of those instruments but what we’re not trying to do is create some kind of pastiche of what we think ancient Greek music sounds like. We’re trying to use those instruments and information from texts as an inspiration for our music. But we know, because the modern ear hears and appreciates music in different scales, different tones to the tonics that were used in that time and also because we had to write a lot of music, a lot of different kinds of music, music for combat, music for exploring, music for quests, that we’re not going to try to be very tied into only certain kinds of instruments or only certain kinds of rhythms. It’s always an unfolding conversation and a process of iteration and trial and error to find the right themes and the right combinations of instruments. So once we’d done our research, we chose the composer, worked with them very closely with them on the score for the kinds of instruments we’d like to use. Completely coincidentally, the brother-in-law of one of our composers is actually Greek and is a musician as well, so they’ve discussed with him a lot and he is one of the musicians who plays on the score. They did a lot of research as well into ancient instruments but also other kinds of instruments that come from Greece or came from that period in time and gradually, over a period of months, we defined our sound, the combination of ancient and modern that we wanted to use, the kind of rhythms that we wanted to use, the kind of instrumentation to allow us to create music for all the different experiences you’re going to have in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. On top of that we then also had the source music, where we were directly working with those ancient instruments and working with people in the UK, Canada and in Greece on the source music you’ll hear throughout the world and the songs that we wrote that appear on the boat as well. So there was a lot of research and a lot of inspiration coming from our story and coming from our world and our characters to help us understand what was the right music to write for the game. Certainly it’s been a very broad collaboration. There have been people in the Greek community in Canada, in the UK and in Greece who we’ve been working with and that’s true for both the music and the actors as well. So there’s been a very close collaboration with the wider Greek community. In terms of the collaboration, there were several things that I knew I wanted to do, one of which was we wanted to have fully systemic naval gameplay back in the game. So I knew that I’d really love to have some songs that were kind of like sea shanties or sailors’ songs that they could sing on the boat. But obviously we didn’t have any records of any of those kind of pieces of music.
Exactly.
There is only, from our [the game’s] time period, one piece of musical annotation that exists, which is carved on a stone column in Greece. When I was doing Victorian England it was very easy to find the sheet music for songs of that period but slightly harder for music from 2500 years ago. So what we did was, I spent some time with our in-house historian. She is specialist in ancient Greece and we talked about the texts of the day, the pieces of plays or poems or other things that we could use as inspiration for lyrics for the kind of songs sailors might sing. So I was thinking, well, maybe sailors sing a song about a victory in war or they sing a song about missing home or they sings a song about the gods of the sea for example. Then we looked for texts that could support that. And then we worked with musicians and composers, a person based in Montreal and another person based in Athens who had worked closely together before, we gave them a group of texts we’d like to use, they selected the pieces, the texts that they felt they could more easily turn into lyrics and then they created the harmonies and the arrangements for the sailors to sing together. And now we have original ancient Greek shanties that are sung on the boat, which are absolutely fantastic, people love them, it’s very atmospheric. We hear these Greek voices singing in Greek and ancient Greek as we sail our boat. And on top of that I also knew that I would like to write some story songs, some songs that reflect on the things that you’ve actually done or you’ve seen in the game. So we chose 10 events or moments in the game that we thought were interesting and we got a very talented lyricist who lives in London. She worked on the lyrics for these songs and she worked in collaboration on some of the melodies of these songs with the composer we’ve been working with in Athens. So we have ten original songs that have also been recorded by the choir that sing on the boat. On the boat you have your shanties and you also hear, gradually throughout the game, both in English and in Greek these original story songs as well. So we’ve created a lot of content using people for many different places to help us and we’ve also recorded lots of instrumental music in the UK with a Greek musician. She had worked with us on performing the songs we’d already written but also on improvising and extemporising on music that she feels works for that time period, on our instruments, for example, the kithara or the lyre. So we have a very wide range of sourced music and we worked on that with people in many different places, including a Greek community choir in Montreal and the choir in Missolonghi as well.
We had no idea you took the time to craft any songs that are bound to some, let’s say, pivotal moments of the campaign. It sounds like you took the time to make some bite-sized epics so to speak.
I hope so. I hope so. If you’re on the boat you’ll gradually hear these songs and if you’re moving around the world you’ll gradually hear these songs as they’re kind of released during the game. You know, we’re very passionate about what we do, we love working on these games, the team are very passionate about what they do and we’ve been very lucky to have such great collaborators in all the different musicians, in all the different actors or voice directors or casting people that we’ve worked with. People are very passionate about this project and I hope, you know, that passion and that excitement about what we’re doing is there in the final project. Because we really enjoyed making it and having the opportunity to do these things.
Earlier on you mentioned making a brief before trying to find the right composer for the job. Could you elaborate on that a bit, on what usually drives you and how you end up making this kind of decision for various games? We think that you yourself have actually worked before with the duo and on the same series no less, right?
Yes, I have worked with The Flight on previous games but the process of choosing them is not just me that gets to make a decision. How we approach working on these projects is myself, a Music Supervisor on the team and other people will talk about the kind of music we think we need for our game, the kind of sounds, the kind of themes, how we want to use the music, what’s important about the story, so we talk a lot with the Creative Director and the Game Director as well and then we write up a brief which gives the description of the game and what we’re trying to achieve and we approach some different composers and we ask them to submit some tracks that they feel would support that brief. Then what we do is we listen to those tracks and we’ll try them against gameplay, we’ll try them against concept art to see how they speak to us. On this project and on Syndicate as well what we did was a blind process where we played the music to the Creative Director and the Game Director in this case and we asked them what tracks really spoke to them and what made them think about moments of the game, all those kind of things and, between us, we agreed on which composers we thought we’d like to work with, who we thought would be the best. But actually, when the Creative Director and the Game Director and the Music Supervisor were listening to those pieces all together, they had no idea that I had actually worked with The Flight before and it wasn’t part of the discussion. It was purely based on did we think these musicians, these composers were the right composers for our projects and we felt that they were. Over time we refine our vision with them and, as I said earlier we’ve create this kind of musical landscape with them, and the fact that I’ve worked with them before was actually completely coincidental to the project because when we were listening to them blind and talking to the Creative Director, the Game Director, producers and I played them to other members of the audio team as well, they didn’t actually know who the composers were and they didn’t know that I’d worked with them before. So it was a completely blind test.
You know we weren’t implying anything sinister, right?
No, no, no! It is a completely natural question because they’re talented composers and I’ve worked with them before but I was very interested to get people’s completely unbiased opinion, because that’s the best way to end up with what’s the best thing for your game. So I was very careful to make sure there was no bias. I’ve worked with quite a few composers and any of those composers could have been in that group, so I try to be very transparent and not influence people’s decisions, because we’re really looking for the very best people to work on the project and we’ve been very happy in working with The Flight, they’ve done a really great job on the music.
We took some time to listen to their earlier works, going beyond soundtracks and what we find interesting is that, we don’t know, maybe it’s just because of the way they work, they seem to have experienced major shifts in style. That gives us real hope that they’re flexible enough to accommodate pretty much anything. Otherwise we wouldn’t really know what to take from their work based on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag alone.
It’s true that Joe and Alexis, the two members of The Flight, are very versatile musicians or composers and they can produce work in quite a lot of different styles as many composers can, because most composers are working across, you know, if you look at Austin Wintory for example, he’s made a lot of different types of games and it’s the same with Joe and Alexis. They’ve worked on many different kinds of projects and I think that experience and that ability is very helpful when you’re working on such a large game, because we need so many different kinds of music. We need music for exploring, we need music for quests, we need music for our interactive dialogues, music for naval battles, music for combat, for fighting with Spartans, fighting with Athenians etc. So working with people that have a very broad range of experience is actually very useful and they’re also very good musicians themselves so they’ve played lots of the instruments that are on the soundtrack. So being able for them to collaborate very closely with musicians, being able to use a mixture of ancient instruments, acoustic instruments, electronic instruments, samples, sound effects, all of those kinds of things together, lead to a very rich and diverse score for a very rich and diverse game. So I think it’s a good fit. The Flight are very creative, they’re very passionate about what they do. I was actually speaking to them earlier today, before coming to this interview. They’re very engaged, they’re very energetic and they really have enjoyed doing the research for this game and creating such a varied range of tracks. It’s been a pleasure working with them.
Let’s squeeze in one more question. Did you work with the main voice actors directly or was this task delegated to someone else?
I’m very happy to talk about the actors and the performers because I’m very involved. Obviously, based on the scope of my job and the fact that we also have voice specialists on the team -I used to direct voice over, I’ve done a lot of voice over directing and casting in the past- but now I haven’t actually directed any of the voice over sessions. We hired voice over directors in the UK, Canada and in Athens to help us with that directly, but I was very involved in the casting of the game and was actually there for all of the casting sessions, for all of the initial casting and for both Michael and Melissanthi who play Alexios and Cassandra I was responsible, with a group of people, because, again, as with the composers, I don’t make decisions by myself. When we decide who we’re going to cast in our main roles, our Creative Director, our Game Director, other sound people, lots of people are involved in that decision. But yes I was directly involved in the casting of Michael and Melisanthi and in the casting of many other actors. I also attended some of the motion capture sessions and, obviously, gave my opinion and my feedback on the other voice work. And it has been a very interesting project and challenge with the amount of speech we recorded and the complexities of our branching dialogues. That’s an added level of complexity and interest for us in how to make sure that all those branching dialogues make sense and that the actors understand what line they’re reacting to and what line’s going to come up next, so we make sure that things feel consistent. But we really worked with some really talented casting people, talented voice directors, engineers and actors, we’ve been very lucky in being able to find such a great range of actors in Canada, in London and in Athens, also a couple of people from the US as well. We’ve had a really great combination of actors who are really great actors, who are really strong character actors and strong with accent, we’ve had other actors who are maybe not first generation Greek but their parents are Greek or their grandparents are Greek and they’ve been very excited to be involved in the the project as well. We’ve had a lot of first generation Greek actors in the US, UK and Canada and then obviously working in Athens as well with a lot of very talented actors there too. So it’s been a really great experience for us and lots of really fantastic opportunities to explore the characters, to explore the language, because all of our crowd characters are recorded in a version of ancient Greek. So we’ve had a translator who’s actually a Greek poet. She’s based in northern Greece and she’s helped us to translate the English script for the crowd into ancient Greek. It’s been a real adventure in language.
This sounds like a very interesting person to meet and have a chat with. There’s not a crystal clear consensus on how each ancient Greek dialect sounded like exactly so, again, you have to fill in a lot of blanks and hope for the best.
Yes, it’s obviously, again, it’s not an academic project, we are building a game, but we’ve spoken extensively with our historian who is an expert in ancient Greece and she has consulted with colleagues of hers worldwide, we’re obviously speaking to people in Athens as well, speaking to actors, voice directors, vocal coaches and people who are performing ancient Greek texts in Greece. It’s really been a group effort and very interesting. Obviously you’re also making sure, because we have place names, people’s names in Greek, we’ve recorded a lexicon of Greek pronunciation so that any actor, wherever we’re recording in the world, has access to that.
We noticed that while playing the game a few weeks back. One thing we are pretty sure about at this point is that the accents are spot on.
Thank you very much, that’s good news. We’ve worked very hard, lots of people have worked very hard and Mellisanthi and Michael, our two main characters, Cassandra and Alexios, they’ve really recorded a lot of dialogue for the game and worked very hard, along with everyone else, all with the people that support that, the engineers, the editors, everyone and it’s very important. The voices and the performances are one of the ways we get our story across to the players and I’m really pleased if people enjoy it and, as you say, if the accents and the pronunciation make sense that’s really cool.
We really appreciate your time.
Obviously I am representing my team and I want to make sure that I have the chance to represent their work well and talk about the elements they’ve done so that people understand the passion and the effort that everybody’s put into this game, so I’m very happy to talk about it.
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