[Joeiss]

IGN: So the concept of the second character, the Frank Carter character, was added later on?

MacNamara: He was always in, but the way the two timelines would come together was added after we'd finished Mark. We knew at what points we wanted the story to dovetail and we knew at what points we wanted it to come apart -- there are sort of time slips between Mark doing something and then jumping to Frank at a later point in the story, and then there are points where we wanted it to come together.

IGN: Besides being built around the mission concepts that you came up, is there anything else that you think influenced the story -- books, or movies?

MacNamara: Well, loads of movies and books as well, but the original kind of movies that we looked at for feel more than anything was Get Carter, you know, with Michael Caine. And then Mona Lisa, and obviously the Lock, Stock series. A lot of London gangster movies, there was a kind of rush on them for a while. Face, that was another good one, Robert Carlisle and Ray Winston. We wanted to get that kind of characterization.

IGN: When I first saw it, a long while back, Charlie's character reminded me of Michael Caine in Mona Lisa...

MacNamara: Yeah, very much so. And at the end, there's a scene in which it's very much like the end of Mona Lisa, where Charlie's in a situation at the end, and Bob Hoskins, he doesn't say anything, but you see about 20 emotions go over his face because he's no longer in control of the situation. It's a great piece of acting. There's moments from all those that we lifted. And there's especially that way that Michael Caine snaps at people in that movie, where he's charming and then goes and snaps at him.

IGN: And Bob Hoskins, too, in The Long Good Friday.

MacNamara: Yeah, everybody watches that one downstairs.

IGN: Talking about acting more, how much of your research into technology was devoted to trying to get more realistic and specific physical acting into scenes?

MacNamara: More of Gavin's time than anyone else's. Once we'd gone down into the scanning room, we knew we had these amazing-looking characters, even in-game. Then Gavin spent a lot of time -- we looked at different types of optical systems. We did about four weeks worth of tests on an optical system, just for character and bodies. We sent out a brief to every kind of motion capture company in the world saying this is what we want to do: we want to do five characters at once, in a scene, and they can freely interact with each other, can you do it? And just about everybody said yes, and we did tests and it wasn't true.

Then we did facial tests, so instead of having the big balls you have in optical capture you have all these tiny little balls, and we tried to get that to work in a system that would work for us. We looked at a blend shade system. We looked at a bone-driven system. And we went with the one we've got here. Meanwhile, with the magnetic system we found out that we could use props, and potentially we could use gloves, so we had some gloves flown in from South Africa, had them adapted to work with that system. Then we got Filmbox to write us a system that would work with five at once, which had never been done before. It was pretty hairy and down to the wire, people flying out from Canada the night before we were trying to shoot. It was a six-week shoot inside a big magnetic field.

IGN: So who exactly makes the system?

MacNamara: Ascension made the motion stage, the magnetic system that we use. It's a 14-foot square, so it's about as big as this room [not very big] -- we have to make the action take place here. So if there's another scene, if it's bigger, we have to break it into parts and then physically translate it together. There's some nice things about it, you can actually put this stage into your scene in the game and actually see a take in real time, you can say I like this performance or I don't like it. But logistically it's very crazy. We asked them if we could get bigger magnets and a bigger area, so we could get big industrial magnets that they use at a car yard, a wrecking yard. They said no, though.

IGN: You mentioned the importance of gloves in the motion capture, is that so you can get finger animations?

MacNamara: Yeah, so when you see that cutscene where Eyebrows is talking to Harry in the back of the car he puts his fingers on the steering wheel and his fingers wrap around it. And when people pick up cigars and stuff. A lot of people's expressions are with their hands.

IGN: As for car modeling, all the cars are licensed?

MacNamara: Yeah, we've approached all of the manufacturers for cars in the game. The only one who's actually said no is Skoda, a European manufacturer. They said they just didn't want to be in a game where people could break the speed limit. I don't know which games you can't break the speed limit in, but everyone else we've approached so far has been okay. We've told them that they roll over and get damaged and all that kind of stuff. We've approached them on the basis that it's like a film and they're cars that are there in London when you drive around. It's not about one particular car, and it's not a racing game per se, either.

IGN: Do you know how many makes total you have, manufacturers?

MacNamara: Off my head, at least 30. Like with Ford we've got the Ford Capri, a Ford Transit van, a Ford Fiesta, the Focus as well. General Motors has got a few different ones there.

IGN: So you've got lots of specifically British cars.

MacNamara: Yeah, well, whatever you could find out on the street. There'll be Peugeots, there'll be Citroens, there's a few Japanese cars as well. The only straight-out American car we have is a Chrysler Voyager. Oh, and a Cherokee.

IGN: What have you thought about people's possible reactions to making such a specifically British game? Did it ever worry you that you're making something that might be unfamiliar to an international audience?

MacNamara: Yeah, we did kind of worry about it, but you know, in America, they make movies about any subject under the sun. It's outside the window for us, so it's easy. When we originally showed people shots of it two years ago, what we thought was possible, people just automatically got a buzz out of it. I think it's because we were trying to do something a little bit different, we were trying to do something a little bit more realistic, we were trying to blend different types of genres. Everybody knew we were going for it, they seem to buy into that we were able to go for it. And they knew it was set in London -- I'm from Australia, you know, but it's one of the world's big cities. Everybody's either been here or wanted to come here, so it's not necessarily a bad thing.