Neil Druckmann  -­‐ The Last Of Us Writer and Director Neil Druckmann is a video game designer who has been working at Naughty Dog for over 10 years. He co wrote and co designed both Uncharted and Uncharted 2, a very popular Naughty Dog franchise. He then wrote and directed The Last OF us, starting in 2010. Before this when he first started, his first assignment at Naughty Dog was a stint programmer on Jak 3 in 2004, he was still at this time doing his Entertainment Technology masters and was only an intern. After this he was then employed by Naughty Dog and continued programming on another new title Jak x -­‐ Combat Racing. After this he was given the uncharted job, ten Uncharted 2 and now The Last Of us. Storyline and the in game world Druckmann mentions that the Last OF Us was an original IP (Intellectual Property), this basically means that the ideas and story for the game was completely new from the creators minds, this gave Druckmann so much freedom and room to explore in completely imagining up his own new world and situations within it. However he also stated in an interview that the game world itself and the visuals took a huge amount of inspiration from an episode of the BBCs: Planet Earth where they were talking about how cities and towns would be completely taken over by wildlife and water and crumble to the ground over time with the loss of human life around. This can really be seen in game as all of the abandoned environments you encounter are very swampy and overgrown, even thought they are in the middle of a town or a city. Another particular inspiration Druckmann had for the game world was a book by Alan Weisman titled ‘The world without us’, the book talks about how the world would change in natural and built environments if humans suddenly disappeared. Druckmann said in an interview: “The book inspired our game world, and explained in detail how structures collapse when left unattended to.” You can really see these visual depictions in the game world when you play.

Druckmann also stated that everything in the game world is in relation to the current part in the story, for example, if the scenery is bright and vibrant the storyline is going well, if it is dark and eerie something bad is going on in the story. Colour, texture, lighting and sound really make the story even more powerful and emotional in gameplay. Working with actors and Performance Capture Troy Baker, the voice of Joel in the last of us said in the Documentary film Grounded: The making of the last of us that Druckmann is “a very willing and free flowing director and the best he has ever worked with”, he also said that “Druckmann does push his actors to get the best performance out of them that he can”. “The use of Performance capture really enhanced that gameplay and the suits make it so incredibly realistic to the actors movements and actions it is almost uncanny”, said Druckmann. In this video clip you can see just how intense and in depth shooting with performance capture is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TxJWy19xxk