The Jeff Gordon feature in NASCAR 09

First of all I want to thank all of you who have posted comments on the blog page. Please keep your thoughts and ideas coming. Interaction between the community and the game team is extremely important to us. We’re currently in the process of fleshing out new and improved ways for game team members to interact more closely with you here in the blogs and on the forums. Stay tuned for more on that in the near future.

Last week was very exciting for us here at the studio, as NASCAR 09 officially hit retail shelves. The response so far has been positive which is good to see. Your feedback and comments throughout the year on the forums and message boards definitely helped us hone in on the important issues and features for NASCAR 09. In the seven years I have been working on the EA Sports NASCAR franchise, NASCAR 09 represents one of the largest new feature set integrations I can remember. I thought I would use this week’s blog to elaborate a little bit on the Jeff Gordon feature, which helps walk players through all the new content in this year’s game.

As the community has pointed out on the forums, NASCAR 09 marks the 3rd time Jeff has graced the cover of our NASCAR game. With that in mind, we wanted to involve him more in the flow of the game. Typically we hadn’t involved our cover athlete to the extent that we did this year, so this presented a fairly new approach to how we presented the game and our marquee driver.

The concept behind this feature was pretty straight forward…have Jeff take the player through the new features in NASCAR 09 and act as a guide through our new Career mode. It was one of those things that sounded pretty easy in concept, but in execution became somewhat tedious.
We went through a very extensive prototyping process for this feature. Before we filmed Jeff, we recorded placeholder videos for all of the Gordon content with yours truly as the acting “talent”.

This helped us to fine tune the script, and navigation of the feature as well as identify any bugs in the tech. Once we had everything locked down, we spent two days in North Carolina recording the final videos with Jeff.

The first day on location, we spent setting up for the shoot. We shot on a big soundstage and it took us an entire day to prepare all the lighting setups for each of Gordon camera views you see in game.

We had run a number of lighting tests back here at Tiburon which helped us to establish some lighting plans for the shoot. These lighting plans then helped establish a baseline look once we started setting up in Charlotte. The camera crew and lighting director worked together with our Tiburon Art Directors (Jerry Phaneuf and Paul Kashuk) to dial in the lighting you see in the final product. Spending the time to set up all these lighting scenarios the day before helped us out big time the next say when Gordon arrived for filming. Since we had marked out all of our lighting locations the day before, we were able to quickly transition the lighting setups during breaks in the shoot. The efforts during this first day are very apparent in the quality of the lighting present in the Gordon character in-game.

After a long day of setup on day one, we rested up and got ready for our day of recording with Jeff. This was the day we had been preparing months for. We had written and re-written the script. We had recorded and implemented placeholder / test videos for all of the Gordon locations you see in game. We had toiled over the flow and corner cases of the player navigation. So we were all a bit on edge as this day began, since we knew the final piece of the puzzle was Jeff’s performance. He arrived to the shoot right on time and changed into his DuPont Racing suit and quickly got some makeup applied. We were now ready to begin shooting.

About two minutes into reading his lines, we all realized that Jeff was nailing it. Compared to my feeble acting in the placeholder videos, Jeff’s performance almost seemed Oscar-worthy. We had set up a teleprompter for Jeff to read the script from. We’d also set up a large projector screen on the wall in front of him so he could see his image against the game’s background in real-time. However, it almost seemed as if he didn’t need this extra help as he breezed through line after line of our script.

When we finished recording the first group of videos we realized that we were actually ahead of schedule. We decided to take a break and put Jeff behind the wheel in the NASCAR 09 game to get his impressions. He loaded up Michigan Speedway and proceeded to turn some practice laps. After a few laps he came in to make some adjustments in the Car Setup Screen to loosen the car up. Once he got back out on the track, the setup changes he made took effect and he began turning faster and faster laps.

To see real NASCAR drivers play our game and utilize the same techniques and strategies they do in real life never gets old, especially when a 4-time champion is behind the wheel. We spent the rest of the day knocking out the rest of the video shoot and Gordon took time between scenes to do media interviews.

At the end of the shoot, we realized that Jeff's performance had helped us finish ahead of schedule and we couldn't wait to get back to Tiburon to start processing the footage.

I’d like to thank the people who appear in this photo with me for their hard work and first rate effort on the Jeff Gordon feature implementation. Pictured from left to right: Myself, Paul Kashuk, Jerry Phaneuf, Scott Stutsman, Jeff Gordon, Scott Sanford, Randy Chase and Kelly Austin.