Items tagged with 'Interview'

When we launched this new web site type place into your life a few months ago, we also published a couple of history articles looking back at the beginnings of Mm and of LittleBigPlanet, which we put together by trapping Alex Evans in a room with a tape recorder, shouting “Go!” and then sitting back for a few hours. This of course means that we are relying on Alex’s notoriously twisted memory, and should take it all with a pinch of nutmeg: we already found out one thing was a total lie, but the rest seems to be quite true!

The first couple of chapters looked at the founding of the studio, pitching the game to Sony,  and building the team up. We left it on a cliffhanger of sorts…. which we will now continue with Chapter 3: Building the game. If you haven’t read the other parts, then I recommend you do so immediately. No not later, now, just do it!

After a fairly intense six months, the small gang of Molecules had been given the green light from Sony to go into full production. Up until now the company had been formed entirely of Lionhead leavers and friends, but now there was a game to make, and some money to make it with, so Media Molecule started to grow.
They advertised, interviewed, hired, all whilst continuing to work on the game…

“It was a weird one, we’d hired key people, but we were all working on such independent things. We didn’t really work together, we discussed together, but there was so much to do that we just… well I could work on a 3D engine, but there was no hope of it integrating with Dave at that stage, Dave was working on a level editor… the PC editor was one of the first things that was made - post green light, we very much focussed on creative tools.”

Read the rest…

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world’s favourite image manipulation suite, and chief tool used in the making of lolcats, Photoshop.
Let’s raise an overly lens-flared champagne glass in celebration!

Computer Arts interviewed a selection of pixel-loving doodle gurus about how Photoshop has changed their lives, including our very own Rex Crowle. Here’s what he did say to them.

What was the first version of Photoshop you used?
Version 5.0 as far as I remember, before that I’d been using Corel PhotoPaint (as it came free with my “Multimedia PC”) and before that, Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.

What were your first impressions?
Initially I was a little disappointed, as it had less plugins than PhotoPaint and no animation features. But, I hadn’t learnt at that stage that plugins are generally pointless, it’s how you use the basic tools that matters!

How would your job be different if Photoshop didn’t exist?
I would destroy a lot more forests-per-day than I currently do.

What do you hate about Photoshop?
The ease of undoing! It can be easy to obsess over redrawing tiny elements to get them perfect, hammering away on the Apple-Z keys, and completely losing the flow of the main piece.

If you had to give one Photoshop tip, what would it be?
Keep it simple and don’t get too distracted by software features. A good idea should still work even if you draw it in MS Paint with a trackball. Although it’ll look rubbish, so don’t do that.

Head on over to Computer Arts to check out all the other similar interviews, including one with our friend Jon Burgerman.

Oh and remember, Photoshop is a powerful and dangerous ally, and not everyone should be allowed to use it.

Games Industry.biz has published an interview with our very own code master and Lead Architect, Paul Holden!

Paul was speaking at the Montreal International Games Summit this week, giving a talk entitled Tools and Testing in LittleBigPlanet: Consequences of a user-generated world. Here’s one of the questions now…

Q: The game’s just over a year old, so what have been the biggest lessons you’ve had to learn?

Paul Holden: We realised pretty quickly how important it is to ensure the quality of the releases and the patches. It’s surprising that even fairly small changes that we’ve made have had large impacts on the community. We have limits set within the game – such as a maximum of 1000 physics objects in a level – but that’s all interconnected. So if we try to bump up one of those limits to give people a bit more freedom that might increase the cost on memory. So we’ve learnt pretty quickly to be very thorough with those updates.

You can, and should, read the full interview with Paul over on Gamesindustry.biz!

Another one year anniversary to celebrate, oh my! It’s been a whole year since the first episode of the LittleBigPodcast, and to celebrate their 40th epicsode, Austin and Daniel invited Tom and Me (Spaff) to be guests on their show, and answer all kinds of pretty silly questions about cheese, films, and the LittleBigPlanet Community.

Happy Birthday guys, keep up the good work!

A big thank you to everyone who came down to our mini fan meet at the Eurogamer Expo! It was a really fantastic day, and we had a lot of fun meeting all you all.

If you couldn’t make it down, don’t be too sad, this is definitely not the last time we do one of these, so hopefully you’ll get your chance!

The internet is now awash with various pics and videos from the event. For instance this interview with Sam and Laura who came down from Studio Cambridge to talk about LBP PSP this extensive interview with Danny, John, and Martin over on Sackcast, and we’ve uploaded a bunch of shots to our Flickr stream.

Highlights from the day include meeting the crazy creative people that make up our community, the tag jamming sessions in Create mode, where various creators and Mm designers jammed together to make some random levels, and being able to play people’s levels with them side by side.

We had a few little party bags to give away to fans that attended, but to get hold of one you had to give us a drawing and say the magic password (Plagachef). This of course means we now have around 100 pieces of fan art to put on our wall, and we’ll hopefully get some pictures of those on the internet soon, lots of creativity and comedy all round, good work.

So, thanks again everyone who came, what an awesome time!

In what we can now claim to be a regular happening, we sent over some interview questions to the awesome artist Vera Bee, whose sticker pack will be changing the face of LittleBigPlanet from today! She sent the questions back to us with some answers on the bottom, and now we have an interview. That’s how that works folks!

So pull up a seat, chill out with some tasty cake, and meet Vera Bee…

Mm:Please introduce yourself!

My name is Vera Brosgol. I’m a lady living in Portland, Oregon, where I draw storyboards for an animation studio called LAIKA, and comic books and illustrations when I’m not doing that.

Mm:When did you start drawing? How did your style emerge?

I started drawing pretty much as soon as I had my grasping skills figured out. My style used to be pretty complicated, but after going to animation school I settled on my own simple cute thing. Animation is a lot of drawing the same stuff over and over so you learn quickly that a simple design is probably best.

Mm:What inspires your work? Do you have any things that you come back to when you are needing some inspiration?

I’m inspired by movies and fashion and plants and birds and what my friends are drawing. When I need some inspiration I trawl the internet for a while and that usually takes care of it. Drawn.ca is a great place to start.

 

Mm:Do you carefully plan your pictures or do you prefer a stream-of consciousness approach?

I used to be pretty cool with just making things up but nowadays I am a big-time organized planner. I bought a Wacom Cintiq and now I can get a rough sketch just right on the computer before printing it and going to the next step. Maybe it’s taking the spontaneity out of things a little bit, but I will accept that for access to an undo button.

Mm:Who are your heroes in art?

I am brimming with admiration for Jillian Tamaki, Frank Stockton, and Bill Presing, who does some wicked cute-girl art. My friend Jon Klassen is the best designer I know. And Fred Moore drew my favorite ladies of all time maybe.

Mm:Have you ever committed a crime against art?

There were some rough patches in high school, that is for sure. I watched more animes than I maybe should have.

Mm:Have you ever committed a crime?  A proper one.

I stole a police notebook once from a college bookstore. It was worth less than a dollar but I think it being a police notebook makes the crime more badass.

Mm:What is your ultimate artistic dream?

I have very small unimpressive dreams because I would like to have them come true someday. Currently I would like to make a children’s book or another short film. I guess if they both won awards that would make it more ultimate. Yes. I would like to make an award-winning children’s book and/or short film.

Mm:Who is your favourite cartoon character in general and why?

I really enjoyed Joan of Arc on the late great Clone High. I related to her on too many levels I think.

Mm:Do you ever play videogames? If so, which ones?

I try not to play too many because life is fleeting, but I just bought a PSP and I am going to play LocoRoco on it like crazy! I love that game so much. If anyone can suggest other adorable PSP games I am all ears.

 

Mm:What do you hope to see people using your stickers for in LittleBigPlanet?

I hope they use the plant ones to make verdant jungly environments. And that the can-can girls will be made enormous and threatening with monstrous animated kicking legs.

Mm:If you were to build a level in LittleBigPlanet, what would it be like?

It would consist entirely of the cabbage sticker in different scales. Cabbageland.

Mm:If you could add another word to the following mantra, what would it be?  Play, Create, Share and…....

Destroy.

Thanks for that Vera! The Vera Bee sticker pack will be available on the PSN store today, as soon as it updates in your region, and costs $1.99 / £1.59.

The European Playstation blog has posted an interview filmed at Gamescon with Mark Green, Senior Producer on LittlebigPlanet PSP. In the video he talks about Create Mode in the portable version of our favourite game, check it out!

The headline says it all, it’s good when that happens isn’t it? Our beloved hat lover Alex was interviewed by the team at GI.biz whilst at the Nordic Game conference recently, where he talked all things LittleBigPlanet, check it out!

A number of key industry figures have said to me that they considered LittleBigPlanet to be possibly the most important title released in 2008 – not based on sales, but because of what it represented for user-generated content. What are your thoughts on that?

Alex Evans: Well, that’s amazing. I remember when we first revealed it at a GDC, we got Peter Molyneux in as an old friend to play it, to see what he thought, and his reaction was: “It’s too ambitious,” which was an enormous compliment, coming from him…

To hear things like that, that it’s important, it’s really good. Post-release it was really interesting because we’d never run a community before, and the industry is changing really fast. The way you do post-release, the way you do add-ons and the way you maintain your community… the MMO guys have got it down, I think – we could learn from them.

I was actually talking to the Sony guys a lot after release, saying that I’d love to look at the way we treat LBP as an MMO. It’s not an MMO at all, and so people were a bit confused, asking me if it was going to become an MMO… I said that almost every game has to be supported with that kind of service mentality, so lots of stuff that I’m working on personally at the moment is geared to that mentality.

The way we’ve structured the team – because everybody at Media Molecule is still doing LBP – we very consciously decided to stick to a focus. Within that we’ve divided it up, and we’ve got all these different features cooking, and we decide very late how they get released and what channel they’re released through.

What I love about the way LBP was received by the industry – but also the players – is that you can jump into it at different levels. You can just play it, and enjoy that side of it, or you can look at it as a platform for expressing yourself.

We haven’t succeeded everywhere, but we’ve definitely tried to do a lot.

To celebrate the release of our first original sticker kit, and a collaboration with doodle captain Jon Burgerman, we covered our site in crazy colourful doodads, and then we put our heads together and wrote ourselves a little interview to send to the man himself.

So, sit down and relax, and meet the man behind the doodles; mister Burgerman. Oh and don’t forget to pop into the PSN store on Thursday, and start using these stickers to brighten up your levels!

Mm:Please introduce yourself!

Hello there, I am an artist called Jon, I am not worm or mole based but do have a beard. I draw, paint and scan but do not juggle bowling pins or press delicate wild-flowers. I’ve worked for many important sounding clients and have never had a single filling or even been stung by a bee. I have exhibited my work far and wide, the furthest being in Australia and the widest being in China.

I enjoy carbohydrates and music from old computer games and am not a fan of lifting heavy objects, going up ladders or football teams who play in red. One day, when all of this is over, I want to go to sleep and not get up until noon at the earliest, unless of course I need a wee, in which case I’d get up but get back in before the duvet goes cold.

Mm:When did you start drawing? How did your style emerge?

I started drawing, as all children do. when I was a child.
The style evolved over time I guess. I didn’t consciously design it, it’s just how I naturally draw.

Mm:What inspires your work? Do you have any things that you come back to when you are needing some inspiration?

I like things that are found in the natural world, like animals and fruit. And of course Fruit Flies, a combination of the two.

Other artists, big and small, provide me with lots of inspiration too, though sometimes it can induce bouts of green hued jealousy.

Mm:Do you carefully plan your pictures or do you prefer a stream-of consciousness approach?

A little bit of both actually. Sometimes it’s more one than the other too, it really depends on how I’m thinking and what I’m doodling.

Either way I like to keep things open enough for improvisation and mistakes. Sometimes your hand knows what it’s doing before you do !

Mm:Who are your heroes in art?

Tony Hart of course (RIP), Matt Groening, Mike Mills, Dave the Chip, Devil Robots, Kurt Schwitters.. plus many more

Mm:Have you ever committed a crime against art?

Oh probably loads. Do I have to admit them here? I hope not.

Mm:Have you ever committed a crime?  A proper one.

Not really, well, nothing serious like murder or cat-napping.  As I child I think I might of kicked a swan but I think my older brother made me do it. (No harm was done to the swan, I kick like a weakling)

Mm:What is your ultimate artistic dream?

To dance in front of millions of people, whilst singing that opera song from the 1990 world cup. If not that then I’d settle for making an animated series of my characters.

Mm:Was the greedy swine drawn from life? :)

Everything comes from somewhere!

Mm:If you were able to change the first part of your surname to be any other kind of food, what would it be? For instance, Haggisman.

Nice idea. I think maybe I’d go for foods I really like:
Jon Pickleman
Jon Vegandumplingman
Jon SaltedKettlecrispsman
Jon Recesespiecesman
Jon Porridgeman

Mm:Who is your favourite character of your own design, and why?

I can’t pick a favourite, imagine how that’d make all the others feel!
I have a soft spot for Pickle Pig because he eats things, pickles them in his belly and then plops them out for people to eat.

Mm:Who is your favourite cartoon character in general and why?

I do love Droopy. All Tex Avery’s characters were brilliant. I should of mentioned him as a hero.
I like it when Droopy appears in after a character has tried to escape him by flying half way around the world, going up a remote mountain, locking himself into a room, opening a cupboard… and finding Droopy there.Ha.

Mm:Do you ever play videogames? If so, which ones?

Yes yes but not as much as I’d like to. I need more hours in the day.
Currently I’m working on GTA on the DS. I like the DS and PSP because I can carry them around and sneak in the odd game of something on the move. I never get a chance to play my consoles at home.
I’m a big fan of 16-bit era gaming and love 8-bit music.
I like platformers and things which are easy to pick up and play and not too long to get through, like LocoRoco for example.

Mm:What do you hope to see people using your stickers for in LittleBigPlanet?

Fun of course! and maybe secret rude things.

Mm:If you were to build a level in LittleBigPlanet, what would it be like?

A big spaghetti mess of doodle-soya-meat-balls and flakes of stinky cheese!

Mm:If you could add another word to the following mantra, what would it be?  Play, Create, Share and…….

Relax?
Sleep ?
Keep all the best stuff for yourself ?

Thanks Jon! Burgerman’s sticker kit will be out in two days time, on Thursday 25th June, and should be priced at $1.99 / £1.59. If you can’t wait until then, why not buy some real stickers and start putting them all over your house and friends?

We were on the Telly last night, on Dom Joly’s Made in Britain, and I’m sure each and every one of you were glued to the sofa too see it. For those who missed it because of an important reason – such as being in the pub for instance – here’s the bit about us, handily uploaded to YouTube and embedded here, oh isn’t the internet marvelous?