We're not saying it lightly when we describe The Force Unleashed as the next chapter in the Star Wars saga -- we know how much weight that carries to Star Wars fans. Many aspects of this game have been amped up to movie-scale, including the lead-up to its release. For the previous Star Wars chapters -- the prequel trilogy -- this lead-up period was extensively chronicled on the official website and in a number of "Making Of" books.
If you tracked the making of Episodes I-III through webdocs, interviews and profiles online, you've probably got an understanding of the principal stages of filmmaking: pre-production, production and post-production. You also watched how George Lucas and his crew blurred the line between these traditional stages with new digital filmmaking tools.
With articles such as the one you're reading now and One-sheets are summaries of the game that fit onto a single sheet of paper. It usually consists of a single piece of concept art and two paragraphs that sum up the game in a tidy "elevator pitch" -- the first paragraph focuses on the story and character, while the second relates to game features. This is followed by a series of bullet-points that help sell the game's features, and the one-sheet ends with an estimated rating, price point and possible platforms. Imagine this being a retailer's sales-sheet for a game that doesn't yet exist. These one-sheets become the foundation of some qualitative and quantitative testing. We went to malls and asked a cross-section of people to vote about what they liked about each one. We saw a lot of trends and feedback from that, which let us focus on and prioritize what people most responded to. Lucas said we could set the story between Episodes III and IV, an area in the Star Wars timeline closely guarded for future projects. He encouraged us to develop the Darth Vader's secret apprentice angle. Looking back at our one-sheet results, we saw that "unleashing the full power of the Force" was a particularly popular bullet point, one that Lucas too latched onto. We took this feedback and crafted a few more one-sheets for testing. Far and away, the story of the Secret Apprentice rose to the surface. With these directives, we had the pre-viz video created to better visually explain the concept of over-the-top Force powers (Brett talks about that video in So in my mind, as soon as we knew internally we wanted to go, that's when the concept stage became preproduction.
There's a stage even before pre-production, called the concept stage. In Star Wars filmmaking terms, it is somewhat analogous to the time George Lucas spent developing story drafts, bouncing ideas off the skeleton crew Art Department before that group of artists increased in number. In the gaming world, it involves generating a lot of ideas for what might make a cool game, and getting those ideas onto paper -- specifically, what we call one-sheets.
