ANDREW MORRIS: On Lotus Trilogy & Kid Chaos (Amiga) - by LemonAmiga.com
70Featuring a very rare and exclusive interview with Amiga Motoring Maestro and Magnetic Fields hero Andrew Morris.
Production Notes:
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Directly after the Gremlin Q & A session featured in Part 5 of A History of Gremlin Graphics, I walked down to the stage and waited patiently for Andrew Morris. Andrew is a hero on the Amiga of course with Lotus and Super Cars, so to meet him was like meeting Spielberg or something (I've seen and played Lotus 1 more times (and longer) than I've seen Raiders or Star Wars; which is 10 times each!). I had no questions prepared as most of my research for the event had been focused on (the absent) Ben Daglish. Although I had done lots of tripod interviews before, I didn't want the interviewee to be bothered by the camera and clam up, so before the event I practised holding the camera on my shoulder to keep it steady while completely ignoring the camera and talking to them like a friend. This kinda worked in that the guys I spoke to did indeed ignore the camera and just chatted like normal. The down side was that because I wasn't checking the viewfinder very often, sometimes the subject would start to disappear off the edge of the screen. I knew I didn't want too much of my own voice on these interviews so I only made the camera centred when the person was speaking. Plus I originally wanted to overlay clips from games in boxes over to the right of the person speaking, so I intentionally tried to keep them over to my left side.
Andrew was drinking cola, not beer, and in case you didn't see it in the Gremlin videos, Andrew doesn't drink (just like me, but I have a kidney complaint) so he was not drunk during the interview. I was very star-struck at first - no kiddin' - and my voice goes up a few registers as I try to find a few words to describe the times I have spent looking at his artwork zooming around a screen for hours. Eventually I came up with a few questions I already half knew the answers to already, and at one stage I was telling him more about his career than he was telling me! In hindsight I wish I'd got a few comments from Ian Stewart about how he got the Lotus licence and why Magnetic Fields and Core Design (both offshoots from Gremlin) were fighting each other over the rear-view racing genre, and did Gremlin ever see any benefit to this. Core Design took over the Monty Mole series with Impossamole, giving away the fact that Core was spawned from the same company!
After the interview I managed to get Andrew to sign the t-shirt I was wearing; which had a bunch of Amiga characters on it which I'd designed myself and had professionally printed. This 'Amiga-scape' happened to have a Super Cars Moroder car on there so I got him to sign near that.
The edit took a few more days than my other two interviews you may have seen already, mainly because I wanted this one to be the best of the three. 90% of the whole interview can be seen in the final cut, but I did cut 10% (which was my fan ramblings) and I chopped up the rest into sections. I then arranged these sections into chronological order starting with the C64 stuff, and edited the audio and video to try to seamlessly join them together without too much jarring. I brought in the titles from the Gremlin talks and added a few captions to introduce the games as they were mentioned. I thought we talked about Super Cars 2, but we didn't, so that's why it isn't there. I also gave up on the idea of having clips from the games in boxes to the right; as Andrew was mostly in the centre of the shot and I didn't honestly have time to move him over to insert graphics from games we've all seen and played a hundred times.
The ending sequence to this video was tweaked several times before I was happy with the result; even though it looks like just a couple of cars and a Game Over sign. On the last day of the edit, and just before I did the final render, I took the 'You Will NOT Copy This Game' sound sample from the Lotus 2 review and chopped out the word 'NOT' - to make it sound like 'You'll Copy This Game'; which is a bit of an in-joke towards the thriving WHDLoad and ADF community of today, and the 90s; because I had the Lotus games on crack before I went out and bought them all full price!
After this interview I shot the 'Worlds First Shit'em-up' moment with Tony, then followed Peter's back-side over to the signing room and got the interview with Shaun Hollingworth. Then I shot the guided tour footage, and bumped into Tony again in the corridor on the way back for his thoughts on Captain Planet and Captive. Peter was there also but I didn't ask him anything as he seemed rather coy about questions. When I got home, the management of the event offered me a free press pass to the next event... sounds great to me!
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