loya

“8:29 PM, the light goes off, the show is about to start. This is an historical event : more than a hundred years after the birth of cinema, after the coming of sound, color, and special effects, the digiscope is born, at last : 10, 9, 8 7, 6, 5…”

Movie creation process relies more and more on digital techniques: special effects are in fact so common that they don’t even catch the watcher's attention. They are so efficient that they can hardly be noticed.

Animation movie is still in a very fast evolution and so is the control of the synthetic actors play. Within two years from now it is very likely that we’ll have to bet on the nature of an actor: real or virtual?

How are these virtual actors directed? It is nearly impossible to control each of their movements, each virtual muscle, or side of their rendered envelope. Generally, fundamental gestures and attitudes are defined (often by recording the movement of a real actor), and commands are then issued like “walk”, “smile”, or “give the left hand”. Soon it will be possible to define Virtual John's mood along with his 3D body, and simply say: “Cyber Mary is entering the room” to have him react. Utopia? Maybe, maybe not, but many signs show we’re already on this path. In video games, characters are usually defined in this autonomous way and adapt themselves to every undefined situation.

In the meantime computer science is moving towards an ultimate paradigm: independent worlds where unpredictable stories can take place, where fate is digital, and where the player is himself an actor — interactor. Fiction is a central component of games: Final Fantasy, Zelda.

Today, playing a video game, and more particularly to an RPG one — a role game with action, animated characters, and a story — leads to a disconcerting question: “what is the difference between this media and an animation movie”. There are in fact many and important ones, but similarity is real.

Where does the game start, and where does the movie end? This is what we would like to explain by delving into this incestuous relationship.

For the first time the junction between these two worlds will be fully explored.

Today we offer to the movie world a new kind of product — the digiscope — along with its new business model.

It is an animation movie — shown in theaters and broadcasted on television. It is a video game. Loya, the movie, is one path between many that Loya, the game, can generate.

Facing his computer, or his game console, the player sees the exact same images, listens to the same sound track, discovers the same story, but with the ability to take control.

Several games became movies — Tomb Raider and his star Lara Croft for example — and many movies inspired video game products. But adaptations were always very loose and the visual identity was far from the original one.

The digiscope is totally different. Both movie and game find their root into a same unique object: an interactive novel. The movie is one possible play, generated by the director during fifty hours, and edited down to a 1:30 movie.

Movie, game: same images, same sounds, same story. Perfect copycat. The movie suddenly becomes a toy in the hands of the gamer who is now a full actor. The emotion of the movie theater has turned to raw action in front of the computer.

Technical evolutions are indeed making this tour de force possible, allowing to create a game with a movie-like graphical quality and vice-versa. But the real heart lies into the best of the digiscope: its story!

A movie directed and produced by a video game. A box that people can buy and that contains all movie unexplored possibilities. A new business scheme is born.

Twenty years ago, Roman was an expropriator. With Loya and Eusebe, his two comrades in arms, he used to commit armed assaults, kidnappings, funds extortions in order to finance the revolution.

Sometimes it is a heavy past to carry around. Roman is involved one more time in a violent adventure, but this time, he is the victim.

Just as if all his memories were rushing back to him, mixing up with the present.

Digging in his memory, Roman will discover that his companions were not guided by the same simple and true revolutionary passion as he was.

Some were driven by money, some by love.

Loya will involve you in a gripping adventure.

Loya is:

- A story like all the best adventure digiscopes.

- Action, love, thinking and humor.

- 3 characters to incarnate, 4 different eras.

- 50 intelligent and autonomous characters that react to your actions.

- Brand new and awesome 3D graphics.

- An amazing high quality sound track.

- The ability to play over the internet.

- On the internet, Belisa story server adding events and characters.

After Isabelle, Loya: a digiscope for movie theatres, TV screens, PC, MAC and Xbox.

Available in autumn 2002.

Thomas Cheysson already took the world of video game by surprise with Isabelle in 1999, for which he has won many awards. He has proved that the very particular look and sensibility of a moviemaker could find a new field of expression in the video game. Now with Loya he comes back to the cinema world, rich of his game designer experience. He offers us the first true hybrid between game and cinema: the digiscope.