A few days ago we arrived in Dublin to meet the first developer for our documentary, Andrew Phelan, who worked on projects like Half-Life, WipeOut, Motorstorm, Total War: Warhammer, Formula one and Hardware Rivals). For me it was the first time in Dublin, so on day 1 Andrew and his wife showed us around while having perfect blue sky weather. This was ofcourse also a great way to get to know each other better.
We always try to meet the people who we plan to film in person beforehand. It makes filming go easier and quicker, because you can skip the first enthousiasm about seeing meeting each other for the first time and it makes everybody more relaxed on the actual filmday. Being filmed can be a scary thing, so it’s nice to know that the people who will film you are fun to have around. During that meeting chat about the filming process, the topics we’re covering, each others backgrounds and life in general. This way you also might find topics you would never have thought of and would make the story more interesting.
So on february 1st 2019 we walked for miles with Andrew and his wife, learning a lot about Dublin and their lives. They’ve been traveling around the world because of Andrew’s work and ended up in Liverpool for Hardware Rivals and now in Dublin, where Andrew’s been born, working as Head of art at Black Shamrock Studios. Black Shamrock Studio is working on their own projects, but also on projects for a lot of other gaming companies. This is the reason we weren’t allowed to film Andrew at work, so we choose to do it at his home a bit to the south of Dublin.
Hardware Rivals brought back my love for game design. – Andrew Phelan
A few months ago we interviewed Adrew already over Skype and we decided to start with the exact same topics again, but now on film ofcourse. This actually went so great that we could do almost every part in 1 take. Besides telling us about his passion for working on Hardware Rivals, he also explained why this game has a special place in his heart and how the work-process went from design to 3D. The graphic design was done by Darren Douglas and Andrew was one of the 3D specialists who translated Darren’s drawings into 3D objects to be used in the game.
And now we are off to Liverpool where we will meet Darren Douglas, but also a few gamers you might know 🙂
