How to Use Hollywood Talent in your Game, with Lev Chapelsky

Jordan: 00:00

Hey, what's up? You're listening to PlayMakers. I'm your host, Jordan Blackman. Every episode, I interview one of the top people in the game industry to learn something about how I can do what I do better. And if you listen along with me, you're gonna learn too. We have an amazing interview this week with Lev Chepelsky, founder of Blind Light, the number one company in the world for connecting game companies and Hollywood.

You're gonna learn all about that and more. So much more right here on this episode of PlayMakers. Maybe you're thinking about working with Hollywood. Maybe you think those Hollywood writers, they've got it down. And those composers, wow, what they do is so cinematic, right? Or you want some of that incredible acting talent that we have the guy who runs that company here on the show today. And that man is Lev Chepelsky. Lev is the guy when you want to connect with Hollywood talent, no matter what kind of talent that is. And so we talk a lot on this episode about how to do that the right way.

What are some of the big mistakes people make? Keep your ear out for some of those. You're going to find them to be very interesting and potentially helpful to you, depending on where you are in your project. This is episode three of Playmakers. As this is going to cloud right now, we are in our launch week.

If you dig what we're doing, if you dig the mission, if you dig the content, please be a part of it. Support us, like, rate, and review. It means so much to us and it helps us get our message out there. You can do all that at brightblack. co slash playmakers. And now let's talk to Lev, because you know, He is going to break it down, and he shares some great stories as well.

See ya on the other side. Well, thanks Lev. It's great to have you here on the show.

Lev: 01:57

Yeah, it's good to be here, Jordan.

Jordan: 01:59

So, you know, as long as I've known you, you've been, like, the Hollywood guy for the games industry. And it's crazy to think about that we first started working together almost ten years ago.

Lev: 02:07

Yeah, that's a long time, buddy. I know.

Jordan: 02:10

So, how did you get into this role? What was your journey to Blindlight coming to fruition and to you getting in this space?

Lev: 02:17

So, way back when, at the turn of the last century, I was working for a dot com startup and we were doing entertainment production. Our mission was to create entertainment for this new medium called the internet.

And we were working with a lot of brilliant people that were recruited from Hollywood to, make this mission a success. And we had programmers in the office that, after hours, would play these new things called online multiplayer games. And they'd be sitting there, and the casting director who worked in house for us would say, “Man, those voices are terrible.” And I'm not going to mention any of the games by title.

Jordan: 02:55

Some of them still are.

Lev: 02:57

Yeah, some of them still are, it's true. And, the music guy that we had in the house would lean over and he'd say, “Holy crap, that music sounds like shit.” Nobody thought of it until that day came when we burned through all of our venture capital. Tens of millions of dollars were gone. And we're wheeling our A round chairs out the door and everybody's saying everything's fine. Where are you going to go from here? What are you going to do now? And, everybody's saying, “man, I don't want to go back to my old Hollywood job, it's so old school. This was so fun. This was so innovative.”

And then one smart kid, a programmer kid said, “Hey, you know, I read about this thing that's coming out. That's going to be called the Xbox. And there's a PlayStation that's going to do a sequel to their machine. It's going to be called the PS2.” These machines are going to need real actors and real music and real storytelling, created by real writers. Why don't we start up a service business and provide that for all these guys? And so that was the whole genesis of Blindlight.

Jordan: 03:55

And so you got to keep the air on chairs. How did you kind of keep the lights on while you were making that transition?

Lev: 03:59

We hunkered down in the conference room at that company for as long as we could, locking the doors so nobody knew what we were doing until the lease really ran out. And then we worked out of each other's homes for the first two years of building this company.

Jordan: 04:11

Wow. Yeah. What was your big break? What was like the first break you guys got?

Lev: 04:16

I'll never forget the first job we did. It was for Sony, and it was a writing job. The game developers had a hard time. They were doing a comedic golf game. Hot Shots Golf.

Jordan: 04:26

Oh, I remember Hot Shots.

Lev: 04:28

So this is like 2001 and they came to developers, typically they had a hard time writing comedic dialogue. It's not their skillset. So they came to us and they said, “can you punch up all this dialogue and write lines for all these situations?”

And we've got advertising writers and copywriters and Hollywood script writers and put them together in a room and did this beautiful thing. There's one classic line from that game where the player hits a sweet shot and you know, we needed 500 ways to say great shot, right? So his partner says, Cream cheese, it became this meme. It kind of went down in history, but anyway, Sony paid us 500 for that. And we pretty much split the money with the writers and everybody was happy. And that was kind of the beginning of our writing discipline.

Jordan: 05:14

How do you still go back to that group of writers? Is that still where you kind of pool, get your writers from advertisers?

Lev: 05:21

We don't go to any of those individual writers cause writers move on. But what we did keep from that was the methodology. We realized that team writing is a lot more applicable to a video game writing than putting an individual writer on a game and expecting him to generate everything that that game needs. So, our writing discipline is really all about putting teams of writers together. It's a TV writing methodology, and it's about writing rooms.

Jordan: 05:45

Yeah, I got to see a little bit of that on the CSI work we did, and I've always felt since that experience that TV writers get games in a way that the movie writers typically do not.

Lev: 05:56

Part of the problem there is that film writers work generally very autonomously. And if you think about a game development team who works autonomously and not with the rest of the team, it's not part of the culture. But very often we see film writers put on projects. That's not, that's something that we do over here. And then the game creative director and the game producers and then the studio heads try to Give them feedback and input and direction and notes and it just doesn't work. And he says, “no, I know what I'm doing. I know what my writing is. This is what you guys need.” And it falls apart. You don't get that when you have a room full of writers.

If somebody has too much ego in that room, they're off, they're out of the room. There's the door and then somebody else can be brought in. It's a managed process that's built to deliver. So that's one reason, right? It's that kind of dynamic of teamwork. But another reason is that TV writers typically are of the mindset, and I'll have to say the demographic, of being gamers. and that's something that we make sure that we do, is we won't put people in a game writing room that haven't had a controller in their hand for the bulk of their existence. If they get the medium and they get the audience, that goes a long way. As opposed to if you get a film writer with marquee credits, who's one of the best storytellers of Hollywood, chances are he's gotten there because he wasn't growing up playing games.

Jordan: 07:19

It seems like the TV writers are also more used to working within deadlines.

Lev: 07:25

Yeah, that's true. So serialized content for television requires a lot of volume of production within a week within a portion of a week and screenwriters can pretty much take as long as they want developing that screenplay. So that's a really good point. The other thing is iteration. Screenwriters kind of deliver their product at the end. They say, here it is, it's beautiful, it's perfect. TV writers are constantly working to improve it, taking feedback, reworking it, and then working together and, and working off of each other and punching things up and that's great for the volume of content that kids need.

Jordan: 08:03

So, TV writers, not Hollywood screenwriters. What else do you wish that the game industry knew about how to work with Hollywood?

Lev: 08:12

You know, there's no pretense here, I would say, in either the game industry or in Blindlight. Because they know that they don't need Hollywood for anything. That's an important premise. We all agree that game developers can make games beautifully on their own. And if they shut the door from Hollywood completely, they'd still make great games. The industry wouldn't suffer. And we here support that. We're not out there trying to peddle Hollywood talent to them. We're just here to facilitate it when they want it. And there's a big difference between need and want. So when they want something from Hollywood, it could be actors. It could be writers. It could be some music production capability. We want them to understand that. There's a way to go about it.

They know that Hollywood is a different beast. But sometimes, that challenges them to step into the ring, and they might just lay bait, or crack a whip, or go in with the elephant gun, and none of those things really work. So, that's why we're here. The way to do that is to have somebody on their side that works inside Hollywood, and knows how to work with Hollywood to get them what they want.

Honestly, too often we'll see game producers that are frustrated film directors or want to be film directors and they try to take too much on. It's tough for us because those are our clients, so we can only push back on them so much before we have to fire the client, but that's something we really want them to understand. It's a lot better for them to take pride in what they do, in game making, and stick to what they do best, rather than to try and cross.

Jordan: 09:48

Blindlight was instrumental for us when I was at Ubisoft to bring on folks like Gary Sinise and Lawrence Fishburne. I mean, it was incredible that we were able to do that.

Lev: 09:58

Yeah, there's a lot of nuance in that, right? So working with Hollywood from the game perspective isn't just hiring actors and then directing them. There's a lot of, for example, legal nuance that follows up to deal making, strategy and tactics. It's a whole different beast and I think, I mean I don't know how many game producers really understand how different the culture is between these two different sectors of the entertainment industry in America.

I don't think it could be more different. The game industry culture is open and transparent and very forthright because its roots are in software development and success is based on merit and intelligence. Which isn't to say Hollywood is stupid, but Hollywood culturally is closed and protective and obscured. Getting ahead in It's based on privilege more than on marriage and relationships. And that comes, that's evolved naturally from a hundred years of heritage and complexity. If you have somebody in a negotiation who's open and forthright and saying this is a smart thing to do, and they're going against somebody who's very savvy in negotiations, but completely closed about, about, about what the facts are.

They're just going to get destroyed. It's nice to have somebody that understands both sides and can play the game in the way that Hollywood plays it. And the funny thing for us there is that, I mean, personally, Jordan, I don't think I could ever work in Hollywood because I don't think I could ever adapt to being such an indirect personality.

But what I really like about being on the outside, if I had to work on the inside. I would have to have elements of egotism. I would have to have elements of insincerity. What I'd like to be on the outside is I can poke at those elements without having to adopt them and come in from the outside and say, “Hey guys, we know what you're doing. We know how you work. It's not the way we work. We're gonna give it to you straight, and we want you to come to our side of the negotiating tactic and see it from this position.” And that's really fun, because you really can't do that on the inside. If you do that on the inside, you're not going to raise up in the ranks or you're just going to be shown the door.

Jordan: 12:21

But do you think it kind of goes both ways? Because on the game industry side, for example, I think a lot of studios are, they think they can do everything themselves. They think that, you know, the game designer is the best person to write the story, for example.

Lev: 12:36

All right. So I'll give you one great example where the most typical error that we see in that regard is a game producer will say rightfully so, Hey, I want to direct the actors in the recording studio because nobody knows this content that they're going to be speaking as well as I do. And they're absolutely right about that. But voice directors,

Jordan: 12:58

I think that might've been me, Lev, at some point.

Lev: 13:01

It's a good natural intuition. And you know, we do this all the time. We educate our clients coming from, we know where they're coming from and we know we can anticipate their initial stances. They're not unintelligent, but they're under informed about, The nuances of Hollywood. So we say, okay, great. That makes sense. That's a great premise, but let's introduce to you this idea of the voice director. You need a director because you need somebody that can speak to the actors in their own language, and they need to be fluent in that language. They also need to understand the psychology of the actor. Actor psychology is a very complex thing of another profession where the professionals are so psychologically dependent.

The voice director also needs to be efficient and economical in what they're doing. That's a business imperative. The game producer who steps into a voice studio is going to eat up time and that's going to be very costly. The voice director needs to maintain the actor's energy. The voice director needs to be cautious of the actor's well being.

This is something that's totally non obvious. But it's a huge issue with actors in Hollywood today. when they're doing a lot of death cries and shouts, there's damage that can occur there. And there's ways to handle that, that you're not going to know about unless you're a professional voice director.

So the voice director isn't just working with the actor though. What they're doing is they're taking a full circle. They're working with the game producer sitting behind the actor. They're incorporating everything that the producer wants out of every line and translating that into the actor's speech, communicating it to the actor in a way that the actor understands and needs. And then getting the best performance out of the actor.

Jordan: 14:43

Right. The producer is still there and they're providing context. They're just, they're talking to the director who's then interpreting that to the actor.

Lev: 14:50

That's exactly right. And reading the nuances of the actor and their expression and in their gestures to figure out whether they go faster, slower, harder, softer, give them a break, give them positive feedback, elevate their energy, bring their energy down. A lot of nuance, so there's really no comparison when we see a producer go in and try to direct actors as, as when we put in a professional voice director.

Jordan: 15:16

Now I still, this may be part of the issue, but I, I still, voice, voice takes and deliveries in, you know, big budget games today that were clearly the line, the person who, who's doing the line did not understand how it was going to be used. It shocks me the budget of games that I will still hear those kinds of errors in.

Lev: 15:36

Yeah, so I'm personally inherently disappointed when I play a game and I listen to all the audio that we produce and put in there. And there's so many good reasons for that, that any game producer is going to recognize when I point them out. So I think I'm going to go through them pretty quickly. You know, one is the inherent difference between linear media and interactive. So the example that you just gave, Jordan, is that, a line doesn't sound like it's contextually appropriate, right? So isn't that the nature of triggering audio file with software implementation, right? Of having dialogue, playback and response to game or play.

Jordan: 16:18

Like cream cheese, for example.

Lev: 16:19

Cream cheese, actually, that's a pretty easy one, right? Because when the golf club hits the ball, it's pretty much the same circumstance every time and the timing can be perfect. Okay, but even in that example, another complication is the mix. So if the mix is dynamic, the dialogue gets stepped on by this, the sound effects or the music and, or the dialogue is just sitting out there on its own as the guy screaming, everything else is silent. You know, it's the problems of interactive audio.

Jordan: 16:48

Right. And you're, you're listening to it on some, is it going to be on two speakers? Is it going to be on five speakers?

Lev: 16:54

Yeah, but think about the difference, right? Think, imagine if you're at Pixar and you're making a Pixar animated movie. Pixar will record every line for that movie 10 or 20 times. They know exactly what it's going to be like sync to picture. They know exactly what the sound mix is going to be for every line. And they work it until it's perfect. You can't do that in interactive gameplay, obviously. So, you're going to get most instances where that line, no matter how it's read, isn't going to be delivered in that gameplay situation the way that it was performed.

Jordan: 17:28

Will Pixar, will they put, like, all the actors of the scene together at the same time?

Lev: 17:34

They'll do both of that. you know, they'll start with just a read through of the script. Tell me what video game starts with a read through of the script and then they start animating from that. But, there's a quality element right there. And they will do group reads, where the actors play off each other. And sometimes that's just a way for the actor to find the line read, and then they'll go back and they'll ADR it, and just re-record that same line in the same way so that it's done perfectly. You know, in games, we generally don't have the opportunity to record every line once. We ran out of time. We ran out of budget.

lines per page. It's: 1200

So when you have to produce all of that, all that volume, And the other issue is, under a much smaller budget, you're really rolling through material. You don't have a chance to go back a second time, let alone 10 or 20 times.

Jordan: 18:47

Right. And also, I mean, what we're asking of the actors, because, you know, I've seen, I've worked on games where we're having one actor do seven characters in two hours.

Lev: 18:58

Yeah, exactly. And that's for budgetary reasons, which makes sense. You know, we just need to pack as much material through the production pipeline as quickly as we can. So I don't blame the producers for doing that. They have nobody to blame either. But the reality is of game budgets. I mean, if they had their dithers, they'd be bringing an actor in to do 10 lines per session, but they know it can't work that way.

Now, when speaking of budget, that's another reason why we have differences in voice acting between linear media and games. If you think about a hundred million dollar film, you're gonna see 10% of that budget go to actor assets, maybe 20%, 40%. Easy to imagine. If you have a hundred million dollar gain, you're not gonna get 1% of that budget going to actor assets, right? So that's a difference of between 20, 30, $40 million and something under a million dollars.

Jordan: 19:52

Other than taking, you know, $20 million out from under the couch. How can game producers get the best results when working with Hollywood and when working with voice actors beyond? Hiring a director, a dedicated director.

Lev: 20:06

So yeah, I mean director was one example of one slice of the VO production pipeline So I think it's essential to understand all of the elements all of the screen elements whenever we do a project we break it down into chronological phases so we start with writing which can generally they can start with Ideation and composing the narrative at the heart And then it can go to script development, and then script polish. Then we go to casting, and there's many phases to casting. There's auditions, and there should be callbacks. There might be table reads.

Jordan: 20:40

You don't just hire Nolan North for every single project?

Lev: 20:44

Yeah, no, unfortunately we don't. I'm not a big fan of that, and I can tell you why. Not that I'm not a big fan of Nolan.

Jordan: 20:50

He's fantastic. He's amazing. He's incredible.

Lev: 20:52

He's amazing. But, you know, if everybody concluded Johnny Depp was the best Hollywood actor, And every time you went into the theater, it was starring Johnny Depp. Every new movie was starring Johnny Depp. You'd get a little tired of it and the productions wouldn't come off as fresh to you.

So I think it makes a lot of sense to mix it up. And, I think it's good. It's good, not only for the games and the audience, but it's good for the acting community too, to pull new talent in and create the next Nolan North. But anyway, I think, getting back to my last point, it's important for game producers to understand all the discrete steps and then have somebody guide them through them, right?

It's casting and then, it's booking and it's setting up the studio and then it's getting the actors in there. It's directing and then it's doing the post and then it's doing QA and then it's delivering. And there's so much nuance in there. Within there, there's dealing with unions, right? Or not. There's doing the legal contracts and doing them properly. There's negotiating the talent rates so that the budget isn't blown out for no reason. Because agents have a tendency to do that. And they'll do it if you give them the chance. There's quality assurance. There's cost control. There's schedule considerations. And, there's, there's doing things right the first time so that you don't have to spend the money and the time to go back and redo it. That's really important.

Jordan: 22:15

knowing when in the game development process to record is also a huge piece.

Lev: 22:20

Boy, it would be beautiful if we could do it like Pixar does it. And, there are some game studios out there. I hope the game developers pay attention to the methodologies that Naughty Dog and Insomniac use where, they do things, they adopt a little bit of the Pixar process that makes sense for them, right? They'll do some scratch tracks, or some early recordings, and then they'll do some animation, and they'll go back and re-record. Do some more animation, and go back and re-record. It costs money. And that's not always available. So, I mean, frankly, Jordan, we've kind of given up on, we can't fight that fight. So they do what they can. And typically they need everything cast, recorded and delivered in the last 3 percent of game development. And that's the game that we play, making sure that we can get that done as efficiently as possible.

Jordan: 23:06

I mean, that's how we did it. The voice work that Naughty Dog gets out of there, their actors and the scripts as well, are just incredible, definitely another level. Those guys and Rockstar are just crushing it.

Lev: 23:21

So yeah, what's the secret sauce there, huh?

Jordan: 23:23

Cash heesh.

Lev: 23:25

Well, cash is the secret sauce to that good voice work because I'll bet anything that they've elevated their spend on voice assets to over 1 percent of their overall budget, and so they're doing that repeat iterative recording process and getting some of the voice work in consideration early on in the development cycle. On the writing side, the methodology isn't as clear cut. I think those guys had the liberty of having great writers in house.

Jordan: 23:55

Amazing talent.

Lev: 23:56

Amazing talent in house. That's not something you can count on. It's not something you can buy. I think those studios were kind of built around that. If you don't have that inherently, you're not going to be able to slide it in the next two weeks before you have to start writing. That's not going to happen. And most studios don't have that built in. So the next best bet is to look outside to a solution that is built for games and makes sense for games and is controllable and can deliver on time and deliver to the game producer's direction, and with the game producer's vision, in the highest consideration.

Jordan: 24:34

Yeah, I mean the work that I did with you guys and with Telltale, it was something I was really proud of. I think it was a Naughty Dog, but within our constraints, I think we did amazing, amazing work.

Lev: 24:47

Yeah, and you know, our solution was a perfect fit there, you needed people that understood the medium. So we got those guys on the team. You also had specific IPs that were licensed IPs, so you needed people that understood those worlds, those characters and how those worlds operate. So we got writers that were actually fans of those franchises, and we combine that with people that know how to write dialogue and people that know how to develop character. You can mix all those elements into a writing room. So it's another example how the team writing process can really overshine what any 1 brilliant writer.

Jordan: 25:27

If a team wants to kind of hire a blind light writer room approach, what kind of budget should they be setting aside for something like that?

Lev: 25:34

Budget question is really an interesting one with writers. A producer's first instinct, which I don't blame them for, is that the best storytellers in the world are Hollywood screenwriters, so I need to get one of them to save my ass and save my job. And I'm going to get on the phone to the CIA and see how much they cost, and then they get these seven figure quotes back, and then they go to the guys that hold the purse strings and they say, “come on, we need to do it.” So our first job is to educate them out of that at all levels. And, we deliver the good news. The good news is that game writers that work collaboratively aren't guys that produce the biggest screenplays in the world or that are staffed on the biggest TV shows in the world.

They're guys that have excellent, dramatic storytelling training, are out here in Hollywood, have some experience, haven't gotten their first break yet, and are playing games and love games. And all that means that their working price is not that expensive. So I guess the short story is you can have five or six or seven or eight writers in a room working together for a fraction of the cost of one highly credited Hollywood screenwriter. So if you want to know specifics, how much? You might have to pay 100,000 for a big screenwriter to do a decent writing project on your game. You might pay 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 for a team of writers to do twice as much work and exponentially the effort they'll put in on the same project.

Jordan: 27:11

And the risk is going to be a lot lower. If somebody gets sick. If there's some sort of contract issue, if there's another opportunity,

Lev: 27:18

The risk is a lot lower. And, the biggest risk is If creatively there's a difference after you see the work product coming back, then the team can be tweaked, but the writer probably can't. That's the biggest risk. Another way we mitigate risk is we always recommend a sample up front because the game producer is going to be skeptical, “Okay, you're doing what? You know, it's not what I imagined. It's something very different than what my boss told me to do. How do I know this is going to work?” Well, here's how we're going to demonstrate it's going to work. Let's take a slice of your story, let's take a slice of your character development. Let's take a slice of your dialogue. We'll take some direction from you and we'll deliver some samples. And you can see for yourself, do that in a couple of weeks.

And we'll do that for pennies. The interesting thing is there's no comparison there with a credited film writer. They don't do samples. They don't pitch their agents say, “you see this guy's credits, you want to hire him or not?” And you have to put the money up front and put it in escrow. It really doesn't matter what you're going to get. Because you're going to have to pay him whether you like it or not. And that's not the way game producers like to work, and it doesn't make sense.

Jordan: 28:25

Sure. So changing gears a little bit, I'm curious how mobile and episodic games have changed the business for Blindlight.

Lev: 28:35

Our business has been built on helping producers that want to create highly dramatic games, make their games more dramatic with, in terms of the dramatic elements. That's what we do. Generally in casual and mobile spaces, there isn't all that same level of drama. It hasn't been our bread and butter, but we've seen interesting demand and we've made interesting segues in there. For example, there's been a big influx lately of demand for celebrities to promote mobile games right?

Jordan: 29:04

After the Kardashian product?

Lev: 29:06

Well, no, so, well, there's a couple elements, right? It could be a mobile game built around a celebrity, which is really a license, which we do, and we do at much lower cost than anybody else that we know out there. There's celebrities who get hired to promote a game like Arnold Schwartzenegger doing TV ads, and then there's celebrities that are hired to essentially star in a game, in an avatar or in voice work, in, on mobile. So in all those three areas, we offer our services to do those deals, to do the legal work, to do the negotiation, also to do the casting, to figure out which ones make sense, which ones are going to be achievable, which ones are going to be good to work with.

That's probably the most work that we've been doing for mobile so far. Mobile audio production just hasn't been a really good outlet for the high quality audio work that we produce. Mobile story writing, I wouldn't be surprised if someday we evolve something for that really haven't seen it happen yet.

Jordan: 30:05

That is a big opportunity. I think casual story writing is where things like having a real grasp of structure makes a huge difference.

Lev: 30:15

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, certainly our methodologies would be very well suited toward that. I don't think it's an obvious thing for the game developers to look for a resource to help them with that. Maybe that's why it hasn't happened yet.

Jordan: 30:29

You know, on the CSI Facebook game, we work with some of the show writers, and, and it did make a difference. And at Zingo on Frontierville and Castleville, we really tried to create like little pop, bite sized stories, cliffhangers, relationships that mattered. You know, if you can get a player engaged with that, that's going to bring them back.

Lev: 30:55

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's some mistrust amongst game producers in casual and mobile because they don't have a lot of room for exposition. And they think if they hire a writer, they're going to get a lot of script back.

Jordan: 31:06

Right. You need less.

Lev: 31:08

Yes, exactly. Okay, so I mean, they get it and we get it too, because we're not a literary agent trying to pawn off writers to try and work in Interactive. We're a service provider that produces writing rather than sending off writers. Produces writing that makes sense for Interactive. So, we believe in less exposition and making sure that the action and the gameplay is what tells the story. So our writers, and our writing producers, and our writing teams, we get that, and they know how to do that, and that can be really valuable, particularly for mobile and casual and episodic genres of games.

Jordan: 31:45

Now, Lev, I know you've been running the GDC Narrative Summit for years now. Is mobile something that people are talking about at the summit, or is it still primarily about the big console games?

Lev: 31:57

Yeah, as an advisor to that summit, and as somebody who figures out what's What the content has to be, in the game narrative portion of the GDC. I'm very concerned about making sure that we're shooting wide in terms of types of games and genres. We definitely were, we definitely included VR and AR, in our storytelling talks, definitely mobile and casual as well as AAA, as well as experimental stuff and, some educational and some theoretical. we go across the board there, that's what we do when we select speakers and we select content, we make sure that we have a good mix of everything.

In the game narrative portion of the GDC, we've kind of gotten away from doing a lot of the post mortem talks and having panels where guys are just kind of bantering at each other and the audience. It's like, “yeah, okay what we're trying to do with game story is get innovators up there who are pushing the boundaries of what games can do in terms of interactive storytelling, how can we as an industry get it beyond better simulations of guns, what do we need to do?” So this is why, for example, last year, I had Sam Barlow up there to tell his story and he didn't tell the story of her story.

He said, is everybody here in the audience familiar with my game? And he got like a 90% hands up and he's like, “okay, I'm going to move on. I'm going to tell you what I think, what I feel and where I think we should go from here.” That's the kind of speaker we like to have, so that's inspirational for the audience, I think, and that's why I'm passionate about being on this advisory board because narrative summit, I'm hoping is going to really help people feel like they can steer this industry forward and make it make a difference and getting it beyond its adolescence. In terms of genre and, and really into something deeper.

Jordan: 33:57

Well, I am a hundred percent on board for that project, and I'm glad to be a brother in arms.

Lev: 34:02

Yeah, absolutely.

Jordan: 34:03

So Lev, let's talk a little bit about voice talent. What do named celebrities cost to bring into a game product?

Lev: 34:13

Excellent question. The first thing that game producers need to know about celebrities is when you take an on camera actor who's an Academy Award winner, their skill set is acting on camera and you put them in the voice booth and they can be completely lost or worse, they can be really potentially terrible.

The best voice talent is professional voice actors. There's really no comparison. That's just a basic premise. And there's a lot of nuance and depth to that. But given that, celebrities sometimes make sense for games for various reasons. But we all know that cost is a huge issue. Our premise is that celebrities can be affordable when we convince them that there's really good reasons for them to take on this project other than the money, we call that the non monetary value. And we tell them, let's focus on the non monetary value every time they go back to the money.

So I'll give you some examples. Susan Sarandon did a game for us because her son said to her, “you got to do this. This is so much cooler than those movies you got those Academy Awards for.” Val Kilmer, on the flip side, we had committed to a game, and then he learned too much about the violence quotient in the game, and he backed out because he didn't want his kids seeing that he was in a production like that, which we completely respected.

Chris Hemsworth, we got him to do a game because he was actually a player, and he's like, “I love this medium. I want to experiment in it.” Paul McCartney, we got him to work on games because he wanted to experiment a new medium, and he wanted to reach this new audience. We got Anthony Hopkins to work for us. I can't quote his rate, but it was not, let's say his market quote, because he didn't want the insult of anyone imitating his personification of the character he created for that film. And you know, we got Bill Clinton to turn down being the president in the Fallout Wasteland, because we could not convince him that there were enough good non monetary reasons for him to do this.

So it doesn't always work. That's the trick. And that requires knowing the psychology of the celebrity, even more so, the psychology of the celebrity's agents, and being able to give them information that they can grab onto that'll get them to put money aside, which is a tough thing to do in Hollywood.

Jordan: 36:37

Lev, as far as I'm concerned, you are absolutely a phenomenon at that.

Lev: 36:41

Well, it's something I've been honing, I guess.

Jordan: 36:43

So where can people find you and find Blindlight?

Lev: 36:46

Well, the easiest thing to do is to go to our website, blindlight.com, blindlight, one word, and ping us through info at. And we have somebody that responds to all those requests. It's unusual, the short story about how I got here is I'm the type of person that likes to seek out unanswered needs in the marketplace. That's my professional background. So I wanted to create a business that did, and something that no other business did, and in this case, it's offering game producers everything they could possibly want from Hollywood and nothing else.

So, we're not an adjunct to a Hollywood post house. We're not somebody working on games on the side while they do something else. We're all about delivering for the game guys. And we evolve processes and methodologies and the people that work on our projects, and it's all made up stuff, so it's not easy for game producers to understand what we do and how we do it.

So, typically, the engagement starts with dialogue and education. We're more than happy to do as much of that as is necessary for somebody to say, Hmm, this might be something that you want to take a chance on.

Jordan: 38:05

Well, thanks for coming on and educating our audience. It's been great.

Lev: 38:08

All right, Jordan. Appreciate it.

Jordan: 38:12

Lev is one of my favorite people to talk to, just in general. He is always fun, always entertaining, and I always learn something too. So I had a great time chatting with him. And if you want to learn more about Lev or Blindlight, or any of the things that we talked about on the show, any of the people, tools, software or games. We'll have links to all those at brightblack.co/playmakers. We'll also have any ways that you can connect to Lev if you want to get in touch with him. If you like what we're doing here on playmakers, subscribe, rate, review. That is how you support us in our launch week, because that's how we get a little bit more visibility on iTunes or Apple podcasts or Stitcher or whatever.You are into Google play, however you roll that helps us out a lot. And it means a lot to me personally, because I'm putting a lot into this show because I believe in it. So on the next episode, we have a truly incredible guest, the legendary Lorne Lanning, who is a unique figure in the game industry, creator of all the odd world games, co-founder of odd world enterprises, and just an amazing voice in the industry.

You will certainly get a sense of that when you listen to the next episode of Playmakers, please don't miss it. It's an amazing one. I will see you then. I'm Jordan Blackman, and you've been listening to Playmakers.