Audio Logs

My Role Executive Producer

Project Team Original Programming @ CBS Interactive

Production Credits Lucy James, Richard Li, Gurkan Erdemli, Evan Langer

Overview

Audio Logs is a series that invites the world’s most creative game designers to tell stories about how their work comes to life.

Our brief was to create an episodic video series that best exemplified GameSpot’s journalistic mission to inform and entertain. My role was Executive Producer, overseeing all creative and budgetary aspects of production.

Visual Style

We shot for a clean and simple aesthetic that created a neutral visual space from which our guests could tell their stories. The core storytelling idea was to use a virtual whiteboard to visualise the narratives.

After trialling a number of solutions, we hit upon using the Microsoft Studio Surface, which allowed our hosts to draw over footage of their games in real-time while we recorded the screen, which we could then use in our edits.

Building Trust With Our Guests

Being open to talking intimately about game development isn’t easy in a world where marketing messages are tightly controlled, but we knew how important it would be to get our subjects “off message” and talking openly. To show our guests they were in safe hands, we needed a good way of explaining our concept in pre-production and decided to make a video demo to help with that process. Producer Lucy James and Production Lead Richard Li put the below explainer together that reflected the style, tone, and concept we were aiming for. It proved invaluable in securing first-rate bookings.

This episode with Cory Barlog of Sony’s Santa Monica Studio is my personal favourite from the series. It brings together all the elements we were aiming for; a charismatic host who is bought into the concept of the show and working with us to reveal a previously unknown and fascinating story about the development of one of the best games of the year.