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 Features
Putting
Madden in Madden:
Memoirs of an EA Sports Video Producer
Wednesday
March 10, 1998. It's 7:45 A.M., and I'm nervously sipping coffee in one
corner of a cavernous television studio belonging to pro football megabroadcaster
and Super Bowl-winning coach John Madden. I've been up since 5:30, I'm
freezing my butt off, and the Ultimatte guy has called to say there's
fog on I-680 and he's going to be late.
The reason I'm up at this godawful hour -- my normal workday runs from
about 10 AM to 7 or 8 (or 9 or 10) in the evening -- is that I'm the audio/video
producer for Electronic Arts' hit game, Madden NFL Football for
the Sony Playstation, Nintendo 64 and PC. I'm the guy who puts Madden
into Madden, and today is the first of the only two days a year
that we actually get to film the Great Man himself. The reason I'm nervous
is that I'm just about to spend around $100,000 in sixteen hours flat.
These are the two most expensive days in the production year, and if I
screw up - and if the Ultimatte guy doesn't show, that will qualify -
I probably won't get a second chance. Somebody will eventually do it again,
at great cost and inconvenience, but it won't be me. I'll be history.
Madden
NFL Football is EA's flagship sports product and its longest-running
franchise. The original John Madden Football was first written
in back in 1989 for the Apple II, if you can believe that. I wasn't at
EA then. I joined the company in 1992, hired as a software engineer to
write their next PC baseball game, the successor to Earl Weaver Baseball.
Not long after I got there EA discovered they could make ten times as
much money developing Genesis and Super Nintendo titles, and they dropped
PC baseball with little ceremony. My producer, the legendary Scott Orr,
liked some comments I had written about the design script I was working
from, and he asked if I wanted to quit programming and be a lead designer
in his new production group. Although sports was not my favorite genre,
the opportunity to be a game designer for Electronic Arts - in any capacity
- was too good to pass up. In 1993 the company began to support the short-lived
3DO Multiplayer in a big way, and of course Madden had to be on
it. It was EA's first-ever sports game for a CD-ROM platform, and I got
to design it.
Five years
and five Maddens later, I'm watching as taciturn, muscular young
men and women begin to move around the vast sound stage, warming up video
gear and lighting. I don't know their names; I hired a production company,
and it supplied them. I'm in charge of this shoot, but most of the time
it runs itself. This is a good thing, because I don't have any formal
training to be an A/V producer. The 3DO machine was the first device EA
had ever supported that was capable of playing video (after a fashion),
so the company insisted that Madden 3DO include a lot of it. As
the designer, it fell to me to decide what to create, then script it,
shoot it, and edit it. Suddenly, and without meaning to, I became my group's
video guru. Subsequent editions of Madden for the new generation
of consoles didn't really need a full-time designer, but they did need
A/V production and I was elected.
Fortunately,
the production company works with such quiet professionalism that its
people don't require much direction, and I just let them get on with it.
Right now their activity centers on a grotesque sculpture in the middle
of the studio, a latex Ronald Reagan mask wearing a cheap white wig, and
impaled on a tripod. Below the mask hangs a navy blue blazer on a hanger.
This bizarre homunculus is John Madden's "lighting stand-in."
We can't afford to have Madden standing around for hours while we get
his lighting right, so this thing serves in his place - Madden's hair
is completely white, and the blazer is a duplicate of the one he'll wear
later. The tripod is cranked up to put his "face" at the correct
height.
The video people tell me that this is one of the best facilities in the
Bay Area. Madden won't fly and he doesn't want to travel more than he
has to - after all, he travels constantly during the football season -
so rather than go somewhere else to film his commercials and other projects,
he built a studio in his home town, Pleasanton. He didn't spare any expense,
either: the walls and ceiling are extra-insulated so traffic noise never
disturbs the recording, and the air conditioning is specially muffled.
The sound stage is huge, the size of a couple of basketball courts, and
about three stories high.
Today we'll be filming, or more accurately, taping, John Madden and his
broadcasting partner, Pat Summerall. We're going to shoot a number of
short clips of Pat and John sitting together, apparently in a stadium
broadcaster's booth, discussing the game that the player has chosen to
play. These clips aren't used for most regular season games, but if it's
opening day, or a Thanksgiving Day game, a playoff game, the Super Bowl,
or the Pro Bowl, then the player will get to see one of these intros before
the game begins. Of course, we have no way of knowing in advance which
two teams will be playing in the game. There will be 31 teams in the upcoming
NFL season, and they can theoretically play each other in 465 possible
combinations. We can't shoot 465 clips - apart from the time it would
take, there isn't room on the CD to store them all - so the material we're
recording has to be generic. They'll talk about the weather conditions,
Madden's preference for real grass fields, the significance of the game
at this point in the playoffs, and so on.
Tomorrow we'll finish taping Pat and John and move on to James Brown,
our EA Sports Studio host (and actually the anchor of Fox's broadcasts).
J.B. is a warm and extremely funny man, and a positive delight to work
with. Harvard-educated, he occasionally does the material we've written
for him in a homeboy vernacular that has the whole crew howling with laughter.
We can't ever use it; in fact some of the things he says we don't even
dare show to anyone outside the team. But over the years we've assembled
a hilarious private collection of out-takes.
After five years of doing this it's familiar now, but I'm still worried
about the missing Ultimatte operator. An Ultimatte is an expensive piece
of gear that makes a person standing in front of a blue (or green) screen
look as if he's standing somewhere else by superimposing, or "matting",
his image onto a background image - in our case, the stadium broadcaster's
booth. This "booth" is actually a computer graphics image created
by our artists. It's not a single image but an endless loop so that it
looks like there's a little movement in the crowd outside the windows.
The crowd is deliberately out of focus so it won't be too obvious that
it's just a loop.
Matting, or "keying" as it's called in television terminology,
is a standard trick to save money. But an Ultimatte is a fiddly device;
it takes forever to set one up and get it tweaked just right. For one
thing, the lighting on the subject has to match the lighting in the background
image. Otherwise the whole thing looks wrong: you see someone who's brightly
lit in a dark place, or lit by yellowish light while the background is
lit by bluish light. We spent all day yesterday getting this figured out,
and now everything should be dialed in correctly. But we still need the
Ultimatte guy here to do the shoot. I can't afford to have Madden, Summerall,
and a whole video crew standing around waiting for one person.
The teleprompter operator comes over to talk to me. Her gear is ready
to go, but she needs the floppy disk that contains the script. The teleprompter
is a clever device, a laptop computer connected to a monitor mounted below
the camera, facing upwards towards the ceiling and displaying the script
- backwards. A one-way mirror in front of the camera lens inverts the
words into readable text and reflects them towards the talent. The camera
looks through the mirror from behind and doesn't see the words, but Pat
and John can read them while looking straight into the lens. They won't
simply read whatever it says, though, because we're trying to create the
impression of an impromptu conversation between the announcers, the kind
of thing that normally precedes a football broadcast. They'll look at
the teleprompter before each take in order to get a sense of what we want,
then improvise somewhat on the material I've written. We often make changes
as we go along. If we find that Pat or John is consistently stumbling
over a line, we'll type in something new. I was up late last night making
changes to the script - as usual, at the last minute the marketing department
wanted some material of their own added - which is why it wasn't ready
until now.
There's a legend around EA that the first time somebody wrote an audio
script for John Madden, they didn't put much effort into it: just wrote
a lot of generic football commentary. Madden took one look, threw it down,
and said, "I'm not going to read this s---." For several years
after that, all the voiceover audio in the game was ad-libbed. Because
it consisted only of "Maddenisms" - short interjections like
"Boom!" and "Where'd that truck come from?!" - on
the Genesis and SNES, this didn't matter much. But when the time came
to do the 3DO edition, we needed a lot more material, and that meant a
real script. In order to produce something that he would be willing to
read, I became an expert on the Madden persona. I transcribed three entire
football broadcasts word-for-word. I studied his vocabulary and grammar,
his inflection and pacing. Finally, in great fear and trepidation, I gave
him my script. The work paid off. He read it, performed it, and didn't
complain. Madden seldom praises anything. He's still a football coach
at heart; you can tell he's pleased with you if he's not tearing your
head off. Once I accidentally typed "backtracking" when I meant
"backpedaling" - the motion linebackers make when they're backing
up and watching the quarterback at the same time. John stopped short and
spent the next two minutes telling me in no uncertain terms that "backtracking"
was not a word he ever had, or ever would, use in his life.
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Wednesday,
Mach 10, 1998
