Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire [PS2]

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As the Senior Art Director of one of the most anticipated games this year, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Alex Laurant discusses the visual style, character design, and transforming the highly succesful film into a respectable video game.

Yahoo! Video Games: First off, please tell us your name and your role on Goblet of Fire.

Alex Laurant: My name is Alex Laurant, and I am the Senior Art Director at Electronic Arts' UK studio most recently working on the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (GoF) video game. I was responsible for establishing the visual style of the GoF game, and then along with the entire art team, developing and implementing this style as the game was built. This involved working with the film production on one side, gathering as much design information from them as possible, and working closely with all the creative leads here on the EA team. The EA team was composed of writers, designers, our production art director, CG supervisors, animators, character modelers, world painters, and more.

YVG: Can you tell us a bit about your background?

AL: I'm lucky enough to have been involved in visual storytelling in a variety of industries and media throughout my entire career. As a kid, what I wanted to do most was make animated monsters and effects for the movies. My grandfather and mother were both professional painters, so I grew up with art all around me and was encouraged to pursue it. My first paying job was drawing designs for rock & roll T-shirts in San Francisco. After design and art school, I worked as a print illustrator and graphic designer before crossing into the digital world in the early '90s working on interactive educational PC games, when the term multimedia was brand new. It was a very young market then, of course, and nothing like today's sophisticated computer games existed yet. Years later I landed my dream job at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic as a Visual Effects Art Director for eight years and worked on films such as Saving Private Ryan, The Mummy, Star Wars Episode 2, Minority Report, Peter Pan, and The Day After Tomorrow. In 2004 I shook things up, changing industries and countries to come work for EA in the UK on GoF.

YVG: How has your background in the film industry influenced or helped you with the development of the Goblet of Fire video game? How was the transition?

AL: My film experience has definitely been useful me on the GoF project and was in fact part of the reason I was invited to be a part of it. I was first brought over by EA with no current game production experience, specifically to bring an outsider's perspective to the design process. For a game like GoF that was trying to move closer to the movie visually, the fact that I was accustomed to film language made it a good match for me. My crossover was fairly smooth, but certainly not always easy. While there are many artistic aspects that game design shares with film design, they are also very different animals. I have discovered that I must balance two perspectives: one as a former film designer relying on my familiar habits to help the game's drama and visual quality, and second as a game art director searching for new approaches and solutions that are specific to games.

There are many established techniques that filmmakers have used for ages to tell great stories and bring audiences into their imaginary worlds. Games have a similar goal of immersing the player as completely as possible. Of course the big difference is that unlike film, games are interactive and the player has control over where they go and what they look at, choices a film's director and cinematographer would have. Therefore games have to be designed for whatever unpredictable ways the player might play, whatever door they may decide to open.

The clear trend is for games to continue to be more cinematic, thus it made sense for the EA GoF team to learn from our movie counterparts. The key for us was not to throw too many film tricks at the screen just to be showy, but rather to carefully choose which of the filmmaker's well-honed tricks would make for the best overall game experience.