Alex Amancio – Storyworlds
Written By: Michael D. McClellan |
At first blush, Peter Higgs and Alex Amancio have nothing in common. Higgs, the theoretical physicist who, during the 1960s, proposed the existence of the so-called “God Particle,” and later won the 2013 Nobel Prize after experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, proved it true, owns neither a TV nor a mobile phone, and was 80 years old before he acquired a computer. Amancio, now the Chief Creative Officer and Founder at Reflector Entertainment, is one of the hottest guys in the entertainment universe, having served as creative director of the two most successful Assassin’s Creed video games, introduced the technology that brought Madonna to life in her groundbreaking, augmented reality performance at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards, and today is at the forefront of a revolution that is bending, stretching, twisting and upending the worlds of entertainment, pop culture, and tech. Common denominators? Is that even possible? Higgs has spent his life in pursuit of answers to some of physics’ most burning questions: Why did some particles acquire a mass just seconds after the Big Bang, allowing them to clump and coalesce into matter, forming things like stars, planets, and people? Why has our universe stuck around for billions of years, when it should have been a fleeting fireball, gone in an instant? Amancio’s universe, on the other hand, exists as an arras of pixels, with whole worlds created by teams of coders and right-brained creatives, all for the enjoyment of a rapidly growing fan base. It would seem that there’s little, if anything, connecting them.
And yet the two men are cut from the same cloth, kindred spirits if you will, one identifying the missing particle in the Standard Model, the other reshaping entertainment’s future with something called “Storyworlds” – an ever-expanding universe that tells stories across multiple platforms or media. Both deal in the currency of creation: Higgs for proving the existence of the omnipresent Higgs field, through which all mass is created; Amancio for interweaving narratives and characters across films, video games, novels, podcasts, comics, and beyond. Both, it turns out, are also modest to a fault. In fact, Britain’s most cherished scientist wasn’t home to take the call on the day of the Nobel announcement, and when a former neighbor stopped to congratulate him in the street, his first response was a puzzled, “What prize?” Embarrassed to be singled out from so many other deserving candidates, Higgs set off to Stockholm to receive his award, blinking in polite bewilderment as his admirers demanded a long-overdue knighthood. The Portuguese-born, Montréal-raised Amancio has been twice nominated by the prestigious Writer’s Guild of America, both times for his storytelling, and yet he’s far more comfortable talking about Unknown 9, Reflector’s maiden Storyworld, than anything to do with Alexandre Amancio.
“We’ve launched a novel trilogy, a comic book series, and a podcast for Unknown 9,” Amancio says. “We’re also developing a triple A video game, a television series, and loads of digital content. It’s an exciting time at Reflector.”
At some point in the not too distant future, the humble paths of Peter Higgs and Alex Amancio are destined to converge, and in a very real way. Quantum computing remains in its formative stages, but its potential to process data exponentially faster than traditional computers could bring about seismic shifts in everything from pharmaceutical research (Biogen has explored quantum-enabled molecule modeling) to finance (Citi and Goldman Sachs both invest in quantum). Naturally, gamers want to know if that outsize computing muscle will transform games, too.
“Quantum computing could certainly become the next frontier,” Amancio says. “There’s no question it has the potential to reshape the entire gaming experience, which makes it an exciting time to be in this business.”
Amancio and his team at Reflector will be well-positioned to leverage these new advances. The Storyworlds they create are each a unique intellectual property, each with unique entry points into the IP’s universe. This means that your favorite character might be the protagonist in the film, while playing a complimentary role in the video game – the stories are independent, but if you experience them all, they tell a broader narrative that expands the overall mythology. It’s up to you to decide the path that you take.
“The concept of transmedia has been around for quite a while,” he says, “but I don’t think anyone has done it quite the way that we do it.”
Take Unknown 9, for example.
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment
Your entry point might be Unknown 9: Chapters, an immersive set of website puzzles in which players go through The Leap Year Society’s recruitment protocol to become Quaestors. Or you might decide to start with Unknown 9: Genesis, the first book in a novel trilogy by bestselling author Layton Green. Or you could opt for the comic book series, Unknown 9: Torment, following Jaden Crowe as he is inducted into a mysterious society and discovers his unbelievable destiny. Other entry points include podcasts, the upcoming video game, a feature film…all of it designed to be consumed in any order, a la carte with you deciding how far you want to go.
“That’s the beauty of IP,” Amancio says. “Every entry point brings with it a different perspective, enriching the overall story. If you consume only one platform – let’s say you just watch the film or you play the console game – you feel satisfied, because each is a closed loop. You have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. You experience it, and you complete the whole narrative. But for those who want more, how do you create narratives that enrich the fan experience? The idea of Storyworlds is to craft narratives where each one gives you a peek into a completely different perspective.”
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If anyone is going to deliver on challenging the status quo, it’s Alexandre Amancio.
Just as Peter Higgs challenged the Standard Model with the discovery of the Higgs boson, Amancio is challenging traditional channels for consuming content. Instead of big companies pushing the content that people consume, such as on TV or in the theatre, for example, Storyworlds interweave a myriad of different producers around a single IP. The result is a democratized platform that is anything but cookie cutter.
“The world has shifted, right?” Amancio asks rhetorically. “Look at the movie industry, even before COVID hit. They were already looking back and asking, ‘Where are the fans? Where are the lines at theaters?’ People aren’t consuming film anymore, at least not in the traditional sense.”
Amancio’s Storyworld epiphany has its genesis in his work at Ubisoft, where he helmed two of the most successful titles in the Assassin’s Creed universe: Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, and Assassin’s Creed Unity. Those experiences convinced him that developing an IP and delivering its content across multiple platforms was the way to go.
Consider Unity.
You play as Arno, a native Frenchman who was born in Versailles to an Assassin father. You’re dropped into Paris, circa 1798, during the French Revolution. The streets are filthy with mud and blood, the air thick with gunpowder smoke. The citizens are starving. The guillotines are doing a brisk business. You play to expose the true powers behind the Revolution. You explore the city, and scale towers to unlock missions. There’s plenty of jumping and stabbing to be had.
When you have a game this rich, it begs for other story streams. Amancio took this with him to Reflector, hell-bent on creating ubiquitous IPs that run the gamut, from social media to gaming consoles to streaming services and back again. Books. Graphic novels. Podcasts. RPG’s. Anime.
Unknown 9 is just the beginning.
Amancio and his Reflector team have other Storyworlds in the works.
Like Peter Higgs, Godfather of the God Particle, it’s all about the creation.
Let’s walk it back to the beginning. Please tell me a little about your childhood – where did you get your insatiable curiosity?
I was actually born in Portugal, which is a southern European country on the Iberian Peninsula, bordering Spain. I didn’t live there long, because my parents moved to Montréal, Canada, when I was a little over three years old. I grew up in a French-speaking city, but my first language is Portuguese. I had to learn French for the first time when I was introduced to school – I actually still remember being 5 years old and not understanding a word that the people were saying, so I had to pick it up as I went. My dad was always of the mindset that we would speak Portuguese at home. That way I would be able to keep that language. He knew that I would be learning French at school, so the other decision that he made was that we would watch TV and movies in English. I think that having been plunged into a lot of different languages and a lot of different cultures at a very early age is probably what formatted my brain the way that it is now. I feel like it helped to develop my creative side. I like solving problems, I like coming up with stuff, and I like to learn. So a very healthy curiosity is part of my DNA. I can’t even imagine not learning. So yes, I really think that being plunged into the unknown from a very young age is what probably what drove me to become this way.
You are an awarding-winning writer and director of the iconic Assassin’s Creed video game series. Please tell me about your first major effort, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.
Both of these projects were extremely important in my creative path. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations was my first project as Creative Director, and it was released in November, 2011. This title was the first where I was really helming the creative vision on the project. It was quite a tough one because I had two major challenges: First, we had to create a brand-new Assassin’s Creed team. That was very challenging in itself. Then, we had to deliver this game in a record amount of time. I think we delivered it in 10 months. What I learned from that experience are three things: You need to have a clear vision from the start; you need to believe in that vision enough to be able to hold onto it no matter what the obstacles in your path; and you need to be smart enough to be flexible in the sense that, there may be times where adapting the vision might get you closer to the final vision than if you had held onto every detail. So, by having that sort of rigidity for certain things, and as well as having the flexibility to deal with problems as they arise, we were able to move forward with belief that what we had from seed was good. All of that stuff I absorbed in that project on the fly. It was really a trial by fire.
From a storytelling standpoint, Revelations was about an aging hero who, for the first time in his life, had to take a step back and look at his life. What was he actually fighting for? What does he want his life to be about? Should he continue on this course, or should he just live for himself? It was also an amazing opportunity to connect two of the most iconic heroes of the franchise –Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, who is the protagonist in the first game, and Ezio, who ended up becoming the star of the franchise. It was exciting to have them both in the same game, and to be able to create a parallel or a mirror with both of their lives, with two ways that a hero’s life could potentially go. So, Revelations was a very cool project for all of those reasons. I’m very proud of how we were able to overcome all of the challenges, and also proud of the depth of the narrative that we were able to craft.
Courtesy Ubisoft
Let’s fast-forward to the fall of 2014, and the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity.
Assassins Creed Unity represented another significant challenge, but we had one big advantage that we didn’t have with Revelations, and that was a lot of time. We also had the biggest team that we had ever assembled for a project. It was about 1,000 people in total. We had 10 studios collaborating together on one single project across several different countries and three continents, from Asia to Europe to America, so it was a very ambitious game.
Unity represented a quantum leap in gaming.
Unity was also based on the AnvilNext 2.0 game engine. Because Unity was the first next-generation title that we were going to deliver using this engine, it was all about how much could we push this new technology – and not just the visuals. We wanted to see what kind of storytelling mechanisms we could push, using the raw power that was suddenly available to us. So we created the biggest city that we had ever created for an Assassin’s Creed game. It was actually to scale; in the previous Assassin’s Creed titles, the houses were actually smaller than in reality. So, if you were able to go into a house, you would immediately realize that things like doorways would be much smaller. For Unity, almost all of the houses could be entered, so they had to be full-scale. We essentially recreated Paris, not as it is today, but as it was in the Middle Ages, and we did it to scale.
The characters were the next logical step in our development process. The thought being, if we create a city that looks and feels more realistic than ever, then that city is going to have a jarring effect if it feels empty. Up until that point, we couldn’t typically have any more than 10-20 characters in a game. We developed a tech that allowed us to have more than 10,000 people, which, for the first time, really allowed us to populate a city as it should be populated. The beauty of these characters is that, if you interact with them, they react like real characters. That advancement really contributed to making the city feel alive and real.
You’ve been twice nominated by the prestigious Writer’s Guild of America.
When I look at the other people that were nominated in that category, these are people that I admire greatly, and whose work I also admire. Just being nominated, and being in the same category as them, is a tremendous honor for me. I’m quite humbled by it, actually.
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment
You’re a born storyteller.
Storytelling is something that I’ve been passionate about my entire life. I talk about technology and all of that stuff, but in reality, these are all just levers. They are devices that allow us to tell stories. Finding new and innovative ways of telling stories is what I’m in this for, and gaming is the perfect marriage of technology and storytelling. It’s what stimulates me. It’s what motivates me.
It’s an exciting time, because I think that video games open the door to a completely new kind of storytelling. When the film industry was in its nascent stages, it used a lot of the language and mechanics of theater. Then, we started understanding how film could be editing, allowing us to jump cut, flashback, and change locations very quickly. That sort of vernacular was born of experience with the medium. It took years and decades to master. In the video game world, we’re still in that nascent stage. We’re still discovering, every day, every year, new ways to push the boundaries of storytelling within those interactive universes that we create.
From what I’ve read, you’re into theoretical physics.
Yes [laughs]. My initial path was science. Physics has always been my passion, and I think theoretical physics is as close to creation as science can get. If you look at those Prince Theories in terms of how the very small things in our universe work, it seems to be subjective in the sense that the universe seems to react to the observer. When you start getting into that stuff, you really start getting very close to how video games function. Maybe that’s part of the subconscious reason that I gravitated towards video games.
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment
You’re now the CCO Reflector Entertainment. Storyworlds are at the heart of your new company.
Reflector was born of certain ideas that I started having when I was at Ubisoft. One thing I realized while working on the Assassin’s Creed universe was that the mythology we were building, and the world that we were creating, transcended the video game medium. So, while I was helming both Revelations and Unity,a lot of my time and attention was focused on the novels and the comic books that were being produced. This work was being done with an internal team that we called the IP Team. As we fleshed these out, it was really important to me that the stories weren’t just redundant stories, or simply an adaptation of the video game story. We wanted stories that transcended the video game – maybe from a different angle, or a different character’s perspective, or maybe even a portion of the story that wasn’t necessarily told within the game. So, instead of having the typical ancillary novels for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, we actually had two novels that, instead of being about the story of the game, were actually prequels. They were the stories of the two main protagonists, and how they got to where they are in the game. In doing so, the novels gave audiences a glimpse into the psyche of these characters. They also fleshed out their backstories, and dived into other important characters that gravitated around them. It was the same thing when it came to the comic books. They weren’t about the game, they were about different things. They were connected to the game through some artifacts, or some side characters. I really felt that this was, in itself, a new form of storytelling.
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment
The storytelling landscape has changed. Would you consider this a paradigm shift?
In a very real sense, yes. I looked at what people were doing 30 years ago. They used to say, “‘I’m a film fan,’ or, ‘I’m a novel fan,’ or, ‘I’m a comic book fan.’ But today, people are far more likely to compare themselves to an IP. Today, they’re a Harry Potter fan. Or a Star Wars fan. Or a Lord of the Rings fan. Which means that they consume that world through multiple platforms – through films, through books, through comics, and through video games.
Does Reflector fill a niche, or is it leading the way in this bigger transformation?
When I started Reflector, I felt that, even though consumers have the evolved towards this way of consuming content, companies had not. Companies still viewed themselves through the lens of what they sold. I felt that this was, in a lot of ways, very similar to the mistake made by Kodak, where Kodak went from being the first, most valuable company in the world in terms of film and pictures, to being bankrupt within a very short amount of time. The reason this happened was because of digital photography. Digital photography essentially made film obsolete. The irony is that digital photography was actually developed by the R&D department at Kodak. They patented the chip that is actually able to transfer images into digital pictures, but then they sold it off. Why? Because it wasn’t part of their main revenue stream, which was film-based cameras. This was the 1970s, when 85% of the cameras purchased were Kodak cameras, and 90% of the film purchased was Kodak film. If Kodak had chosen to identify themselves not as a film company, but as an image company, or a memory company, they would likely still be the 800-pound gorilla in an industry that today is dominated by others. If they had evolved toward digital photography, they might also be making all the stuff that we take for granted today, things like Photoshop, smartphone cameras, and the like.
It seems like a common mistake that doom a lot of companies.
The same thing happened to Blockbuster. Blockbuster should’ve been about getting entertainment to people wherever they were, but they forgot about that. Instead, they were all about brick-and-mortar stores that rented out cassettes and DVDs. The same thing happened to them. Had they aligned themselves properly, they could have become Netflix.
Do you see the same potential for this cycle repeating itself in the entertainment space?
Very much so. Who knows if the traditional film industry, which has focused on movies being released to theatres first, is going to survive COVID, much less the transformation it has been going through in the past decade. The one thing I know for sure is that people are always going to consume audio and visual experiences. So, if companies sort of view themselves as producers of media, if they see themselves as creators of worlds and characters, then maybe that would open new doors.
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment
Reflector is platform agnostic, with something you call “Storyworlds” at the center. Not the other way around, where channels drive the creativity.
That is essentially the concept we developed while working on Assassin’s Creed, and the motivating factor that led me to create Reflector Entertainment. Reflector is precisely as you describe: It’s a company that creates worlds that we call Storyworlds, which we then deploy them across media. One product is no more important than the other. Of course we have our revenue streams, and we have certain products and certain media that we don’t think will make money, but we still believe that these are good vectors for telling stories, and that they enrich the overall IP. These products bring value to the universe that we are creating, whether or not they make money.
What’s going on at Reflector right now?
We’re busy creating our very first Storyworld, which is called Unknown 9. Unknown 9 is a very ambitious universe that we’ve crafted, which is something that I’ve built around an old East Indian mythology. Right now we are busy creating a novel trilogy, a comic book series, a podcast series, and a video game. We’re also developing a film, as well as loads of digital content. And we’re developing an entire digital platform that will host it all.
Please tell me about the teams that you have at Reflector. Are teams critical to the success of these Storyworlds?
That’s an excellent question, because what we do is ultimately all about the people. IP is all about ideas, right? Reflector is built on what comes out of people’s minds. The critical thing is finding the best talent all over the world. I think that one thing that was really important for Reflector from the beginning is that, yeah, we’re based in Montréal, and we have an amazing talent pool of people that are expert video game developers, but we are not limited to that, right? We will find the best possible collaborators, wherever they are. For this reason, we do work with a lot of people that are remote. For example, some of our authors are in Europe, and some of them are in the United States, so the idea of finding the right collaborators is the most critical element.
Another important part of team development is creating a healthy mix of veterans and up-and-coming talent. You’re reassured by bringing in established talent with proven track records, people that you can judge by their work and the projects that they’ve already been through. The newcomers bring fresh ideas and perspectives. It allows us to counterbalance our experienced talent that with the young, up-and-comers that still have a lot of stars in their eyes and think that they can do the impossible. I think it not only rejuvenates the veterans, it also benefits the newcomers, because they benefit from working with veterans who have years of knowledge and expertise. It’s a very symbiotic relationship. This also helps ensure an amazing level of diversity.
Courtesy Reflector Entertainment
How much creative freedom are they given?
Once you get the right people, you can give them a sandbox and let them create. You have to make sure that everything still fits together, and that everything still lines up, but you have to give people the creative freedom that will allow them to shine. When people feel that they’re trusted and have the freedom to express themselves, I think that they will do their best work and transcend even what they thought was possible. For those reasons, trust, creativity, and respect are the pillars that make up Reflector.
Do you see yourself as the conductor of an orchestra?
I think that that is a great analogy. An orchestra has its sections – you have your star violinist in the first chair, and then there are other very talented violinists occupying the other chairs in that section – and these sections have to be perfectly in concert with the other sections in order for the symphony to sound its best. It’s the conductor’s job to unify performers, set the tempo, and control the interpretation and pacing of the music. That’s really what my job is at Reflector. It’s a great analogy.
Creativity output isn’t the same as mass-producing widgets. Do you have to keep that in mind, even with deadlines looming?
Yes, absolutely. Placing undo stress on someone often makes them less creative, so you have to balance the need to finish something on time with the need to get the most out of your team creatively. You have to keep in mind that creativity isn’t something you produce by flipping a switch. Constant, undo pressure can lead to burnout and a loss of creativity. I want my teams to enjoy their work, whether they are developing a book, a video game, or a comic. Passionate, engaged, and motivated teams can achieve far more than the work given to them.
The Assassin’s Creed titles that you helmed at Ubisoft are known for their quality. Now that you’re at Reflector, how do you maintain that same focus on excellence?
It’s important to keep in mind that excellence is something that is very fleeting. It’s something that is almost intangible – you can chase after it, but you never catch it. If you are lucky, and if you chase it with enough passion, energy, and temerity, then I think it’s something that you can sort of touch the edge of. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t, but what’s most important is the chase. When I look around this industry, I think a lot of products have become just that – products. In many cases they are good enough, but they don’t exceed expectations. At Reflector, we want to produce transcendent work. I think can only be achieved when you are truly in the pursuit of excellence.
Final Question: If you had one piece of advice for other aspiring creatives, what would that be?
If you are able to keep that sacred fire kindled, and if you have in your mind the that your work is going to be a lifelong pursuit, then I think it’s possible to have long and successful career doing what you love.
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