Under the leadership and creative direction of co-founders David Wheeler and Rob Landeros, Aftermath Media announces the release of "Tender Loving Care," a thriller based on the novel by Andrew Neiderman. Aftermath's creative team boasts a notable record in software development, artistic production and direction, filmmaking and interactive design. To take advantage of the best available resources - both technical and creative - Aftermath follows a Hollywood studio business model, which provides the company with the flexibility to bring aboard leading creative and technical talent for each project. Key Management Rob Landeros is one of the creative forces behind Aftermath's interactive dramas. Landeros, who designed and co-created the best-selling CD-ROM "The 7th Guest" (tm), most recently was CEO and creative director of Trilobyte. Prior to that he was art director of Virgin Interactive Entertainment Games, where he pioneered and developed leading software titles such as "Spirit of Excalibur" and "Lexi-Cross." From 1987 - 1989 he art directed most of Cinemaware's titles, including "Defender of the Crown" and "Rocket Ranger". 

David Wheeler is the other creative force behind Aftermath's interactive dramas. He is an award-winning documentary filmmaker (EMMY) and commercial director (CLIO), and has written and directed numerous television dramas as well as several interactive works including "The 11th Hour," "Clandestiny," "Dog Eat Dog," and "Tender Loving Care" which is also a full length feature film. 

Aftermath, the production company formed by the partners, has an exceptional approach to interactive narrative. "We believe substantive story content is universally appealing and suitable for delivery in all forms of media, including CD-ROM, DVD, film, television and the Internet." said Wheeler. 

"Tender Loving Care" is a true multimedia product in that it will be experienced on CD-ROM and DVD, seen in theaters, on television and video (The Internet is not quite ready for our technology yet, but, when it catches up, we will have the perfect mass appeal product for the medium.) 

 Even more intriguing, the characters and plot elements of TLC are guided by the viewer's own personal comfort level as indicated by his or her perceptions, predilections, and aversions. The CD-ROM is structured to develop a psychological profile of the viewer through a series of exit polls and thematic apperception tests (TATs) placed after each episode in the story. TATs are psychological tests commonly used to measure personality characteristics through projective techniques focusing on dominate drives, emotions, sentiments, complexes, attitudes, and conflicts. 

 G.S.: Rob, your reputation with the success of "7th Guest" startled the industry. How did you come to develop it? What were your background and skills at that time and what gave you the concept? 

 R.L.: For the first 3/4 of my life, my skills and training had been as a fine artist and illustrator. In 1982 I bought a Commodore 64 to play games. But that computer came with the Basic language built in, and so I taught myself how to program. I found that making my own games was much more fun and challenging than just playing them. I suppose I proved to myself that I could do coding, but my talents were in the visual arts. So when the Amiga came along, with Deluxe Paint, which had a palette of 32 colors out of thousands of possible colors, that's when I decided this was a viable medium for professional artists and that one could make a living in the field of computer graphics. So I learned how to use the paint app and over the course of about 3 months, I put together a small portfolio of work and took it to a game company named Cinemaware. They hired me as company Art Director. We feel that, so far, the industry has barely scratched the surface of interactive storytelling and that the key to the future of entertainment is interactivity. 

 G.S.: So you started in the industry creating games? 

 R.L.: I then moved on to Virgin Games. After being there for two years and working on a variety of projects, I became disenchanted with the direction they were moving. I was more interested in pursuing more sophisticated forms of entertainment for the older, PC users market. To me, the most attractive avenue was that of CD-ROM, the market for which was virtually non-existent at that time. This was around the latter part of 1989. 

 G.S.: I'm tempted to say... and the rest is history... Your success has been the stuff of which legends are made. When did you make the leap to producing content for CD's? 

 R.L.: Our job description at the time was to stay on top of the new technology, which meant that we went to a bunch of conferences to try to figure out when this technology would be viable, when there might be an installed base and most importantly, what you could do with it. After a while, we figured out that few people knew exactly what they were going to do with it. At one gigantic conference, hosted by Microsoft, we sat in an auditorium filled with about 800 people and the speaker asked, "Who is planning to make games for CD-ROM?". We were only two of four people to raise our hands. 

G.S.: That certainly put you in a unique place. What impact did the revelation have? 

 R.L.: Soon thereafter, we decided to quit writing conference reports and start writing a design document for a CD-ROM game... one that would be the first to take full advantage of the medium. 

 G.S.: Starting out in a distinctly new direction, there must have been a lot to unwrap. What were some of the stumbling blocks as you got into the project? 

 R.L.: There were many stumbling blocks. First of all, the specs we set out for ourselves required that the game be in SVGA resolution. That is 640x480 at 250 colors. Games at that time were 320x240 and 32 colors. When we started, there were no tools, such as paint programs, with which to do this. 

 G.S.: You had an entire technology department at your disposal. Did you make use of proprietary utilities or of off-the-shelf products? 

 R.L.: Fortunately for us, Autodesk came out with 3D Studio, a 3D modeling and animation program which could render out frames of animated objects at any resolution. Shortly thereafter, they came out with Autodesk Animator Pro, a paint app which could handle the screen and color depth resolutions we wanted. Autodesk had a player program which could play frames of animation at low resolutions, but we had to write our own player to play our hi-res output. This required our own proprietary encoding compression and playback techniques. No small matter, that. 

 G.S.: So some of the implementation had to be developed? 

 R.L.: Yes, We had to write tools to digitally composite the video characters into the virtual backgrounds. Also to interleave synched sound files with the animations. In fact we had to write tools for everything. Plus we didn't know much about video production or much of anything else when we jumped into this. Nobody else in the game industry did either. It was a totally new adventure. We made it up as we went along. The other major stumbling block was storage. "7th Guest" was the largest game ever made and required 20 gigabytes of on-line storage. Remember, this was back before networks and gigabyte servers were commonplace. And then there was the matter of "asset management". On a project this massive, with thousands of individual files including sound, animation, graphics, both original, raw assets and processed files (compressed or computer enhanced files), it was a major thing just to keep track of what and where these things were. 

 G.S.: It sounds like you were called upon to invent all the aspects of production. Were there any pleasant surprises? Things that were easier than you expected? 

 R.L.: NOTHING WAS EASY! Everything that could go wrong, did. There was no aspect that we didn't have to do over at least twice. The only thing that was a pleasant surprise was how well the title was received by the public. 

 G.S.: The success of "7th Guest" proved you were on the right track and that there was a place for interactive fiction on CD. David, you came into the picture with "11th Hour." Had you two worked together before? What was the force behind the cooperative effort? Do you have complimentary skills? 

 D.W.: No, we had not worked together before. When I first moved to Oregon, I read in the Ashland newspaper that Rob would be presenting "The 7th Guest" as an interactive work in progress at a meeting of the Southern Oregon Film and Video Association. I went out of curiosity and was very impressed. We didn't actually meet but a few months later a producer named Howard Schreiber had been asked for a bid on Trilobyte's next project, "The 11th Hour," and he brought the script to me and asked me to get involved. Shortly after, Rob and I were working together. He surprised me. His background was as an artist and an interactive designer yet he had a deep interest in story and character development which was exactly what I intended to bring to the project along with a more cinematic presentation than I had seen in "The 7th Guest." On the other hand, I surprised myself in that I actually had some kind of understanding of possible applications of interactivity to storytelling. I came up with an idea that we developed into an interface and I didn't even know what an interface was. I turned out to be some kind of interactive idiot savant. 

 G.S.: We all have a lot to learn from successful production teams, David. What's the division of work in the partnership? 

 D.W.: Rob and I have worked together for almost four years now. Basically, I'm more focused on the story and the on the interactive design but we share in each other's area quite a lot. But it's never a situation of two people trying to do the same thing and getting in each other's way. There is no sense of competition. We have a common goal and work towards that. If there's a problem, whether it be an aspect of design or a casting decision, we work to find a solution and when we find one, we move on. I don't recall a single incident of disagreement, which is saying a lot after four years of working in a creative process that is potentially rife with disagreement. 

 G.S.: Aftermath Media is in Medford, Oregon. Is that where all this started? 

 D.W.: Actually, Aftermath is in Ashland which is about 10 miles south of Medford and less than 20 miles from the California border. Ashland is a very pretty little mountain town with a population of 16,000. It's surprisingly sophisticated and culturally advanced. It's the home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Southern Oregon University and is populated with a lot of actors and artists and ex-San Francisco chefs. Rob lived here back in the early '80s when he was literally scratching out a living as a scrimshaw artist and when he formed Trilobyte, he had been living in Southern California and convinced his former partner to move up here. They settled in Jacksonville, another nearby town of exceptional beauty, which is where we started working together. I was living in Los Angeles and bought a vacation home here in 1990 and moved here full time in 1992 with the intention of commuting to L.A. But, as it's turned out, except for the first few months, I've never had to commute. I met Rob and life as I had known it changed dramatically. Trilobyte grew rather quickly and we moved twice over the next couple of years as we expanded from 6 employees to 50. 

 G.S.: Aftermath has an unusual philosophy regarding interactive media that characterizes your work and defines your direction. 

 R.L.: Our unique approach to interactive story development sets the company apart from other developers. Emphasizing the well-founded principles of storytelling such as plot, character development and pacing, our titles evoke something rare in interactive storytelling -- emotions. Aftermath's interactive stories scare, arouse, perplex, intrigue and engage. 

 By combining the best elements of cinema, literature, visual arts and music with high production values and elegant, unique interactive design, Aftermath creates products which have an appeal that goes far beyond the limited range of the gaming community into that of the mass audience. 

 Currently, Aftermath is working on the "Tender Loving Care" film and CD-ROM project that Landeros brought with him from Trilobyte. The interactive, multiple-ending, 35 mm filmed CD-ROM centers around a Hitchcockian tale of a husband, his traumatized wife, a nurse and the mystery surrounding the tragic accident involving their only child. Ultimately, the story becomes an emotional roller-coaster ride of lust, deception, and power. "Tender Loving Care" is the first product created for a parallel release in the feature film and CD-ROM markets. Both products are born from a single creative team and share the same content and cast, led by two-time Academy Award nominee John Hurt. "Tender Loving Care" is a true multimedia product in that it will be experienced on CD-ROM and DVD, seen in theaters, on television and video. (The Internet is not quite ready for our technology yet, but, when it catches up, we will have the perfect, mass appeal product for the medium.) 

 G.S.: You have taken some original approaches to TLC that change the way the structure of the story is presented and how the interactivity is used. What have you done and how is that accomplished? 

R.L.: We started with a singular, linear screenplay. It was basically a three character play but the main attraction was that, as the story unfolds, one is constantly intrigued as to who these people really are and why they are behaving as they do and, most importantly, no one turns out to be who they seemed to be in the beginning. We pushed this aspect in the interactive script and created sequences in which the characters could exhibit wildly different aspects of their personalities and the specific sequence which the viewer sees is a direct result of the viewer's reactions to the story and the psycho-social-political traits the viewer is exhibiting in response to John Hurt's (who stars as the psychiatrist and your interactive guide) vague but probing inquiries. Often he uses objects and works of art in the filmed environment to trigger these responses. 

 G.S.: The innovative manner of storytelling requires something more of the user, as well, doesn't it? 

 R.L.: In TLC, the interactivity exists to enhance the story and deepen our understanding of the characters and their motivations. Without getting into too many details, I'll just describe the general concept. Imagine watching a movie or reading a book while sitting in a chair which is wired with biofeedback devices which measure your physical and psychological and emotional responses to what you are seeing, hearing or reading. Imagine that the movie or book actually adjusts itself according to your responses. This adjustment would be transparent to you. You react to the movie/book and it reacts to you, all on a subconscious level. Both viewer and medium are interacting with each other. Of course, we do not provide a chair rigged with biofeedback devices, but TLC does employ some psychiatric techniques to measure your conscious and subconscious reactions. 

 G.S.: But that demands a lot of planning with characters of equal strength and attraction. How do you go about controlling the story line through many threads? Do you write the main story line first and then apply branches once you have established a linear play through? 

 D.W.: Creating various "threads" was an early concept in the development of interactive storytelling and it's one which almost everyone still clings to. I think it may be the reason behind the failure of most of the so-called interactive movies. In fact the very term "interactive movie" is so associated with failure that we have been discouraged from using it. Pundits in both the gaming and film industries claim that interactive movies just don't work. But we know they can work. Just take a look at "Tender Loving Care." Most other attempts have not had the thoroughness of story development or a thoughtful enough interactive design which truly connects to the story, and they've mostly been miserable failures....But back to the main point - - TLC doesn't branch, it bulges. There are many segments or scenes which are done in various different ways but all versions work seamlessly with the preceding and following scenes. 

 G.S.: TLC is breaking new ground, not only in the ability to accommodate the user across all platforms, but in the manner in which the story is told. 

 R.L.: Our unique approach to interactive story development sets the company apart from other developers. Emphasizing the well-founded principles of storytelling such as plot, character development and pacing, our titles evoke something rare in interactive storytelling -- emotions. Aftermath's interactive stories scare, arouse, perplex, intrigue and engage. Aftermath is headed in a direction where story means everything. 

 G.S.: That's something that fiction lovers can appreciate. 

 R.L.: Unlike the games we've done in the past, good plot, drama and characterization become even more important. We are attempting to bring the same qualities that make for good literature and cinema to interactive storytelling. For now, we have chosen stories that are thrillers but which delve into human drama. We think we are more than doing our part to push the medium into new genres that stand apart from the traditional "gaming" categories. So these days, I don't talk or think too much in terms of gaming elements. I am thinking more in terms of using the interactivity of new media to deepen, broaden and enrich the dramatic and narrative content. 

 G.S.: What was the chronology of the putting together parallel formats? 

D.W.: It went something like this: We wrote a screenplay then developed an interactive design. We then expanded the screenplay to follow the interactive design. Next was pre-production then shooting of the filmed elements. While we were at each location, our artists came in and measured and photographed everything, then recreated the environments and all objects in 3D. During post production of the film, we worked on the interactive elements such as the characters' diaries, email, books, magazine articles, poetry, journals, etc., and we created phone messages and radio shows and audio cassettes. Then we devised the Thematic Apperception Tests which allow the computer to form a psychological profile of the viewer. When the film elements were completed with musical score and color correction and such, we compressed the images and sound with our proprietary compression (which is the best in the world) so that we could fit this massive project onto four CD's. Then we had an enormous engineering task to connect all the bits of this 40 or so gigabytes of data to play out in a seamless, entertaining fashion and to ensure that the unfolding of the story was a direct result of the viewer's input and at the same time keeping the mechanisms totally invisible to the viewer. 

G.S.: Using full screen, live action for the CD is very exciting. It will permit all the nuances of a movie on the home PC. When will the CD be available? 

 D.W.: The CD will be available in the fall, followed by a DVD version. 

 G.S.: A case of the content getting ahead of the technology. That's a twist. Well, no need to tell you, we'll be waching for it. Thank you for leading the way. 

© 1997  

Interview by Gloria Stern of HollywoodNetwork