Community Theatre

Community Theatre is the fifth of the collectible Golden Film Reels, featuring director's commentary with Ken Levine and Shawn Robertson, hosted by Geoff Keighley. The Golden Film Reels are exclusive to the remastered version of BioShock, part of BioShock: The Collection.
==Location==
In the projection booth in Fleet Hall in Fort Frolic
==Transcript==
Finding the film reel in-game gives the following warning: SPOILER WARNING: The commentary contains in-depth discussion of plot details, including the ending. First-time players may wish to complete the game before viewing.
The host is Geoff Keighley.
Ken Levine's given credits are: Creative Director: System Shock 2, BioShock, BioShock, BioShock Infinite.
Shawn Robertson's given credits are: Animation Lead / Director: BioShock, BioShock Infinite.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player climbs up the stairs to Neptune's Bounty from the Bathysphere towards the "Smuggler" corpse; player observes Little Sisters drawing in Tenenbaum's Sanctuary in Olympus Heights; J.S. Steinman's final confrontation scene in the surgery theater in Dr. Steinman's Aesthetic Ideals in the Medical Pavilion; Sander Cohen walks down the stairs after player completes Cohen's Quadtych in Fort Frolic; player looks around at the transformed, curtained, and decorated Rapture Metro station in Fort Frolic]
KEIGHLEY: Rapture is filled corner to corner with detail and history and the cast of characters that occupy this world are no less dynamic. Every Splicer, every level boss has a story. In many ways, these characters are a reflection of their environment, and their environment a reflection of their character.
[TITLE SCREEN: IMAGINING BIOSHOCK - COMMUNITY THEATRE - HOSTED BY GEOFF KEIGHLEY]
KEIGHLEY: Let's talk about some of the characters in BioShock. There's so many that fans love and there are many Wikia pages about them. You know one thing that I think a lot of fans may not realize is you were telling stories with these characters, you know, a decade ago and technology today as we saw in, you know, a game like Infinite, you can do amazing things with facial expressions and storytelling. Conveying that emotion that you did 10 years ago with limited technology was challenging. How hard was it back in the day to sort of you know convey story in-engine?
LEVINE: We had such a small team that, you know, we had to show Tenenbaum or Atlas they were just Splicer models, right?
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
KEIGHLEY: Oh really? Wow. Yeah.
ROBERTSON: Tenenbaum was Lady Smith, which is, there's, there's a reason that she's in shadow behind glass and it's not to be dramatic, it's because we couldn't afford to build another...
KEIGHLEY: Really?
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
KEIGHLEY: So you just, so-um-something as simple as that like you couldn't afford to build a model?
LEVINE: We, we, we didn't have the, yeah. We, we, we were...
ROBERTSON: We didn't have the uh, the budget at the time to build a new character model...
LEVINE: Yeah we had a few character models in the game, there's what maybe 8 or 9 character models...
KEIGHLEY: Really? Wow.
ROBERTSON: So we're like, "Oh, we'll put her in silhouette behind a light and people will think it's noir.
KEIGHLEY: And so much of it was driven by the, the voice performance I feel like too.
ROBERTSON: Yes.
KEIGHLEY: Because I mean that, it all had to it was like a radio play in many ways still.
LEVINE: Yeah we had some really good actors and I was able to spend a lot of time with them and the fact that I could write this stuff, direct it, and then rewrite in the room. And the fact that we had actors who were, for whatever reason, you know, I went in, I didn't, I wasn't even in the same room as them, I was on a speakerphone.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: They were in a studio in New York or LA or something. I never met, phht, I don't think I met any of them. Uhm.
KEIGHLEY: Really? None of the actors in BioShock you ever met in person when you were making the game?
LEVINE: Maybe since...
KEIGHLEY: Wow.
LEVINE: ...but at the time I hadn't met a single one of them.
KEIGHLEY: That's fascinating.
LEVINE: Except for maybe a couple of people like, you know, I played the Circus of Values thing, Nate Wells played the uh, the char- the Jack on the tr-, on the plane, you know.
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
LEVINE: A couple people in the studio. It was community theater, you know, in terms of the, the tech and the sort of time we had for it, but the actors were, you know, we some exceptional actors.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player sees Julie Langford panicking at Andrew Ryan's voice in Langford Research Laboratories in Arcadia; player is frozen by Martin Finnegan in the Frozen Tunnel in Fort Frolic; players sees J.S. Steinman mutilating a body in Dr. Steinman's Aesthetic Ideals in the Medical Pavilion]
ROBERTSON: And, I will say, as, as, you know, doing animation on that game that you can hide bad animation behind really good audio and it makes the animation look better. We didn't have a tech animator, it was me. I'd never rigged characters before and now we're, now I'm rigging characters trying to figure out how, you know, to get all these characters out...
KEIGHLEY: Right to tech those out.
ROBERTSON: ...to the animation team so we're very limited when it came to animation tools. I've since apologized to my animators, you know...
LEVINE: Yeah, but you, you did the, you did the, well no but you did the Big Dad-, I mean for your f- your first game that you rigged the Big Daddy...
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: ...which is, you know, it's not an easy character to rig.
ROBERTSON: It was, you know, we figured it out, but the tools that we had on Infinite were not the tools that we had on BioShock so you've, we figured out what we could do and what we could do well, and tried to hide, kind of you know, put into the darkness the things that we knew we couldn't do very well. And having voice actors of that caliber that can bring those characters to life you tend to fill in the blanks.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player sees Andrew Ryan on the television screen after moving from the Transit Hub to the bulkhead to the Medical Pavilion, Andrew Ryan: "So tell me, friend... which one of the bitches sent you? The KGB wolf, or the CIA jackal? Here's the news: Rapture isn't some sunken ship for you to plunder and Andrew Ryan isn't a giddy socialite who can be slapped around by government muscle."]
KEIGHLEY: And you did get to revisit Rapture in the DLC for Infinite and, you know, with today's technology or technology from a few years ago, it I'm sure was liberating for you guys in some ways to be able to, to use that tech to bring the environment and also characters to life. What was that experience like for you guys to go back and sort of revisit Rapture?
LEVINE: Well, it was liberating because you got to revisit it, but we also I think when we started I thought we'd be able to go reuse some of the old assets.
ROBERTSON: [laughs]
LEVINE: And they just didn't hold up anymore...
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: ...compared to the Infinite assets. So we basically had to rebuild, not just rebuild everything from scratch, we had to reimagine it from scratch because, you know, we-we had the ability to make it look grander and bigger but still feel like exactly like Rapture. It was a different kind of, we were making a different kind of experience than, than BioShock one, so it was tricky to find, to make it feel like it was the same kind of game, um, 'cause it wasn't. You know, the first one was sort of an action game the second one was really a stealth game. Um, you know the Burial at Sea Part 2 was really a stealth game and you're really telling the story of Elizabeth throughout those things.
KEIGHLEY: Yeah.
LEVINE: So it was a different lens, but it was also cool because it allowed me to make the whole story about Elizabeth. You know to have her be central to the, the franchise from the very beginning and she is always, you know, she became the heart of it to me and and to have her. It was really exciting for me to make her, you know, her heroism be something that set the events of BioShock into motion which eventually, you know, saves all of the Little Sisters. That was, that was really gratifying, a nice way to tie the whole thing up for me.
KEIGHLEY: And you probably didn't have that idea 10 years ago right? Had to retrofit it all?
LEVINE: I had to ah, I had no idea.
KEIGHLEY: And your master plan?
ROBERTSON: He has a letter that he's addressed to himself that's 10 years old. Yeah.
LEVINE: [sing-song] I don't know.
ROBERTSON: I mean for me it was, it was a, it was a nice way for me to say goodbye to BioShock and BioShock Infinite because, you know, those two worlds together, you know, you don't realize, or I don't think the audience realizes how much time you spend with these character trying to get them out and polished and in-into the world and it was a good opportunity I think as a game developer to kind of have that little coda at the end where you're like "Okay I-I get to, now I-I'm ready to move on to the next thing I've had a nice, you know, break."
KEIGHLEY: Right.
ROBERTSON: Like, "Let's-let's, let's seal this off" and now, now I'm on to the next thing.
LEVINE: And it was like 12 years of our lives too.
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: Between the w-, the very beginning of it and it was a long time.
ROBERTSON: Well I mean so, my daughter who is 16 now, I did a lot of filming of her when she was...
LEVINE: Oh yeah.
ROBERTSON: ...6 as a Little Sister...
KEIGHLEY: Oh wow.
ROBERTSON: ...and this was, was not mocap it was just running around the office and I'm like trying to be like, "Um, now trip over the thing and pretend you die."
LEVINE: [laughs]
ROBERTSON: Oh really, you know like trying like to not like...
LEVINE: Drink some blood! Drink some blood!
ROBERTSON: ...traumatize this 6 year old, yeah. "Pretend you're drinking something", you know and I never showed her the actual game until much later, but she, uh, on BSI I used her, I put her in a mocap suit and actually used her for the Little Sister...
KEIGHLEY: Oh wow. Uh-huh.
ROBERTSON: ...in Paris that's running after the balloon so that was kind of for me, like a nice, yeah.
KEIGHLEY: Nice way to connect it all together. Were there any characters on the original game that you found hardest to write? I mean you mentioned like you know recasting Atlas things like that, but was there a character that was ch- the most challenging for you Ken?
LEVINE: Well, Atlas because, you know, he was basically written completely twice. That was very, very tough and I was very happy about the original character and I thought I'd really done something great and then you show it to people on, they just hated it. And they didn't trust him. And if they didn't trust him, we were screwed.
KEIGHLEY: All falls apart, yeah.
LEVINE: And so it was tough 'cause we um, after having gone through all the recording, the actor, had to let the actor go, it-it was no fault of his own, right. It's-it was on us.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player takes the elevator from the Atrium to the upper floors in Welcome to Rapture as Atlas talks on the radio]
LEVINE: He-he had invested in it and to tell him that it wasn't going to happen and rewrite it from scratch, that was hard. And that was, that was tough and then after I finished it, I had a debate with somebody on the team who felt the accent was really, really phony an Eng-...
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
LEVINE: We had an English person on the team and he felt the accent was really, really phony so and at the last minute, we basically end up doing a focus test in-in Ireland, um.
KEIGHLEY: Really, wow.
LEVINE: To see if people bought the accent. Because actually the actor playing Atlas was Irish.
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player sees Atlas down below in the Submarine Bay in the Smuggler's Hideout]
LEVINE: But he was from a different part of Ireland.
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
LEVINE: So he was playing a different kind of Irish accent, um.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: I don't think he was from Dublin and Atlas who had a Dublin accent and so at the last minute I thought I was going to have to do it again.
KEIGHLEY: Oh wow.
LEVINE: And fortunately the focus test came back, um and the-then people loved it.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player is in the Bathysphere in Welcome to Rapture, Atlas comes on the Service Radio, Atlas: "I don't know how you survived that place crash, but I've never been one to question providence. I'm Atlas, and I aim to keep you alive."]
KEIGHLEY: And a lot of the villains in the game felt like they were, you know, very much tied to certain levels and this was you know, you were still in an environment of levels with BioShock, right? It wasn't just big open world. Did that all sort of get designed together, it's like "here's the best villain that's going to fit to this environment and this theme of, you know, this area"?
LEVINE: Some of them work better than others I mean I think obviously Steinman like Steinman and especially and Sander Cohen really I think dominate in terms of the level boss.
KEIGHLEY: They are their levels.
LEVINE: They are the levels and, and some of the characters didn't hold up as well I don't think, um, on the writing side.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player enters the Surgery wing of the Medical Pavilion; Dr. Steinman stops mutilating the corpse on the operating table, picks up a Machine Gun and fires at the window in front of the player in Dr. Steinman's Aesthetic Ideals in the Medical Pavilion; player looks around at the transformed, curtained, and decorated Rapture Metro station in Fort Frolic; Sander Cohen walks down the stairs after player completes Cohen's Quadtych in Fort Frolic; Kyle Fitzpatrick plays a bomb-encrusted piano under duress in Fleet Hall in Fort Frolic]
LEVINE: The fun thing about the characters that work like Steinman where he had all those little displays with the scissors and the tech, you know that was something our team came up with to support that character and obviously Sander Cohen in that level, you know, I had this idea for this character and, you know, it's this artist and, and taking Andrew Ryan's thinking to the extreme, you know, through a lens of art.
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
LEVINE: Was really fun. They're really, I mean, in a lot of ways they're more like Batman villains than they are like actual, you know, real-world villains that they all have a thea-, you know, Joker cares far more about the humor and the dark humor that he has The Riddler cares more about the riddles than he actually does about money, you know.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: The money, the crime is just a-an afterthought.
KEIGHLEY: Right, right.
LEVINE: It's the philosophy. And so these characters have a lot in common with, and there's probably a lot of inspiration taken from sort of characters like the Joker in terms of, you've got like a-any of the characters in BioShock because they were really driven by their ideology. And but their ideology is a mask for their sense of selves, right? You know, this stuff is really Cohen knows he's a hack and he doesn't want to, you know, he can't admit that to himself so he has to wrap himself in all this nonsense because the last thing he'd ever do is look in the mirror and say..."I'm not much of an artist."
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player enters the darkened main hall of Fort Frolic as the neon lights turn on one by one and Sander Cohen talks on the radio, Sander Cohen: "No need to thank me for jamming the transmission of those boors Atlas and Ryan. Let them have their squabble. The artist, yes, the artist, knows there is richer earth to till."]
Category:Golden Film Reels