“We did want to avoid the old FMV kind of approach that was very much like you're watching a movie, and you have two buttons on the screen, and you click one and that plays a different movie,” Erica director Jack Attridge tells me. “When you go from game to game, you start to appreciate you know what your analogue sticks do on each game, and the right trigger is always shoot. But if you are coming to one of those games for the first time, you're a little lost. And it's such an abstract approach to trying to replicate real life. Whereas when we put the opening interaction of Erica as a Zippo lighter, and we find that we never have to tell people what to do, because they just open up the lid [via theꦍ touchpad] in the same way that they would with a lighter in real life.”
Erica originally released on PS4, making use of the DualShock touchpad, before making the jump to iOS - the platform it was originally conceived for. Last month though, it launched on PC, and Attridge explained what he hoped the latest release would mean. “We started on iOS, mainly because we couldn't afford a decent PC,” Attridge admits. “Then PlayStation were the ones who challenged us to bring it into the living room, and we started saying, ‘Well, maybe you can use your phone as a remote’ or ‘Maybe you can use the trackpad on the DualShock’. Then after we finished Erica, we🌜 said ‘Okay, we started this on෴ iOS, the code is still there on iOS, so let's just port over, let's wrap it up’. And now [we get to] explore something that we've been wanting to create, which was a PC platform, because we just feel like it's much more of a core gamer audience that you get. People are open to new things and open to experiments.”
And Erica is quite the experiment. Every scene is “bespoke,” as Attridge puts it, merging the worlds of film and video game much more seamlessly than other FMVs or video games that take their aesthetic cues from blockbusters ever have. With this approach comes a lot of replayability too - Pavle Mihajlovic, who co-founded Erica studio Flavourworks with Attridge, knows of one player who has played the game through 27 times. “They probably 🐬still haven't seen every single bit of footage,” Mihajlovic says. “It would take some incredible planning to actually see every single bit of footage in 27 playthroughs.”
While the two worlds come together well in the finished product, Erica’s approach did require a lot of adaptation across the board. “It's very differen🦩t to the film industry,” Attridge says. “We didn't want to have this sense that we just threw this game design doc over a wall to a film studio and said ‘Hey, go off and film it.’ It was very important that the film crew felt like an extension of the game team. We had to figure out how do we disrupt this industry that has been doing the same thing, same work, but doing something the same way for over 100 years. Whereas in video games, every time you make a video 𓂃game, it's kind of like ripping up the rulebook and stuff and starting again.”
One way in which these two industries found common ground was through Holly Earl, the lead actress playing the titular Erica. Earl brings experience from Doctor Who, Humans, Skins, and Cuckoo, but she also understood what it meant to be in a video game, something Attridge says helped everything run smoothly. “We’re very lucky because Holly, specifically, was phenomenal,” he says. “She knew all these different paths, for hundreds and hundreds of minutes of content, and was able to pivot from one emotion to ℱthe other and make them work in a way that when you're cutting them together, you don't have the sharp contrasts. We will play that video game where there's one voiceover line that was recorded, maybe a bit out of context. And suddenly, the performance really spikes in a noticeable way. I think, in terms of the seamlessness of the edit, it's probably one of the best jobs of that ever, because we're not interacting once every five minutes, we're interacting every 15 seconds. A big part of that was making sure the player never forgot that they were playing a game. Especially if you are at your desktop on a computer, you want to be leaning forward, you don't want to be tricked into leaning back too far. I think that’s a big key to what makes Erica apart above the sort of traditional FMV genre.”
While Earl was singled out by Attridge, he feels ꦏher connection to gaming despite not coming from that industry is a sign of the changing times for gaming in media. “We're growing up with the first wave of filmmakers that get, appreciate, and respect games as being this dominant medium in the 21st century,” Attridge says. “When you start having those kinds of conversations, it doesn't feel awkward. They get it. So after a while, you start getting into these terminologies and sho💙rthands that we're having to build from scratch, because prior to Erica, this was an unsolved thing.”
Shooting a game in this way also means the actors have a far more active role in the performance, and have license to take control of their character, in a way that’s not possible even in motion capture, because the character is made collaboratively with artists and programmers having to interpret the performance for the digital space, rather than just putting it on screen as happens in Erica. “It turns it more into a collaboration with the actors,” Mihajlov♑ic says. “More so than a traditional game because you have these artists spending so much time deeply embedded in their character, and then they can bring a lot of that into the game. Sometimes it's different than what you'd imagine before you shot it. Holly brought so much into character that that ended up changing the game into something slightly different due to her and all the other artists creative input, which is awesome because then have this collaboration with a completely new set of people.”
With this integration of live action into the gaming space, Erica also had an opportunity to explore finer details in a way current gaming tech and fidelity still often falls short on. “I think Neil Druckmann, who's been really supportive of us, said in an interview somewhere, it was more expensive to do Ellie and Riley taking selfies in a photo booth than it was to do Nathan Drake jumping out of an exploding building,” Attridಞge says. “It's the human bits that are really fiddly and delicate. You spend millions of dollars trying to get to that nuance of a human face, and we can just point a camera at them and get all of that nuance for free.”
Erica has relatively simple scenes, such as its titular character turning a page in a book, that in a traditional video game would have been incredibly expensive to get right, because of the thinness of paper and the way it moves. However, in live action, it’s as easy as literally opening a book. The difficulty comes with designing the room as a playable space. In a game, because things are constructed from the ground up, level designers are able to organically influence players to interact with certain objects. Here though, the props exist within the real world, and there 💟might not always be content attached to them, with Attridge and Mihajlovic explaining that shots would often make them want to click certain items that𒉰 were supposed to be ignored, and so the finer details of the prop placement had to be considered in much more depth than they would be in a film. Despite this extra challenge, ultimately Attridge sees Erica’s ability to illuminate the smaller objects and interactions as a huge advantage.
“In a normal narrative game, you might have two thirds of bespoke content,” Attridge says, “Then one third of the game might be free roam, where you just walk wherever you want. Ultimately, that's hours of gameplay where the p𓆉layer is just going from piece of content piece of content. I think we saw [Erica] as an opportunity to always make sure there was never a sense of copy and paste, which is a great advantage here. It means we put a little less emphasis on the environments, more emphasis on characte𒀰rs, and then when we do put the emphasis on the environments, it's not the wide shot, it's the extreme closeup of detail.”