Hollywood Goes Gaming:

The Men Behind the Turtles

It took 28 months of computer-generated animation work to bring the beloved comic book favorites, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to life on the big screen. The programmers at Ubisoft's famous Montreal Studio, best known for Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell games and the Prince of Persia franchise took almost that much time working with Imagi Animation Studios to bring the Turtles movie to Xbox 360™ with the TMNT™ (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) video game.

The Turtles are acrobatic ninjas.

Kevin Munroe, the director of the TMNT movie, actually got his start in videogames with Shiny Entertainment and then went on to create Freaky Flyers at Midway Games. He moved from CGI in games to CGI in films and brought his gaming knowledge to the table early on in development of the TMNT game.

Munroe met with Nick Harper, a creative director at Ubisoft, to give his opinions on what the movie was about and how that might translate to gameplay. For Ubi, it was the first time they had worked with a Hollywood director that used to work in the videogame industry. It was the beginning of a very cooperative partnership that has yielded a game that feels just like the new feature film.

CGI Movies Meet CGI Games
According to Harper, Ubisoft is getting very close with Xbox 360 to bridging the gap between the quality of CG audiences see in movies and those they experience at home with video games.

"The movie is really trying to explore those
darker feelings of being a teenager: Acceptance,
responsibility and becoming an adult."

"With a single movie frame, the creators can take as long as they like to get it just right, whereas with a game, everything is happening right there in front of the player," said Harper. "I think if you look at a still of a videogame image it will look quite beautiful, but as soon as everything starts to move is where you notice the difference."

"In a game everything has to be reactive," Harper continued, "So it's not possible to fluidly animate everything from frame to frame like you would in a movie. We have lots of techniques to smooth things out, of course, but I don't think we're going to be perfect just yet."

Munroe, who was sent an Xbox 360 dev kit, so he could play the game as it was being made, was amazed at the technology today's game makers have to work with. He said it was very important to allow players to swap from one turtle to another on the fly, which translates the element of teamwork from the movie to the game.

"The idea that teamwork comes out whenever you earn your brothers' trust in the TMNT game, it just adds that little extra layer of story and character that just wasn't there before, which is cool," said Munroe.

Spider-Man isn't the only hero who climbs walls.

The New Turtles
Those who remember the trilogy of TMNT movies that featured animatronic Turtles created by the Jim Henson Company are in for an experience much more faithful to the original comic book franchise this time around.

"The direction for the movie and game is darker than previous Turtle outings," said Harper. "The movie is really trying to explore those darker feelings of being a teenager: Acceptance, responsibility, and becoming an adult. That's reflected very much in the movie plot and therefore the look. So it goes for the game."

"Using the CGI medium has allowed the Turtles to be more expressive and create a more believable reality than the Jim Henson suits," said Munroe, who added that he loved those suits and those films. "The camera work is crazy and it makes you feel like you're really tagging along with the Turtles."

Harper said the biggest difference in the game is that the team used a lot of acrobatics to navigate around their world. Previous games have strongly focused on combat, but when Harper saw early footage of the movie it was clear that acrobatics was an important part of being a ninja.

Heroes on the half shell take out the trash.

Shell Appeal
Since they first debuted in 1985 as a black and white underground comic book, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have appeared on the big screen, in animated form on TV, and in a never-ending stream of video games from Konami, and now Ubi. Harper believes that the long-lived appeal of the Turtles comes from their many timeless themes: Adolescence, conflict, humor, action, and the bonds of family.

"You've got the serious leader, the goofy younger brother, the scientist nerd, and the powerful rebel: Everyone can associate in some ways to at least one of the characters, and once they are together the banter is really appealing and often funny," said Harper.

Ubisoft's game allows Turtle fans to explore the brothers' new film world more deeply, in addition to allowing you to step into their shells and battle it out with a new group of bad guys.

Article by John Gaudiosi