Pat Murphy:

Hi, and welcome to the MCA Prodcast. It’s your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy, and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now, and I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s many more around the corner.

Each week on The Prodcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of production for the future. And we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today you’re going to meet Josh Tsui. Josh spent over two decades working in video game development at EA and Midway games. He also co-founded two AAA game development studios, partnering with Microsoft and Activision to create original IP and to refresh the historic Tony Hawk franchise. Recently, he led a team of creatives, technologists, and designers producing large scale location-based experiences with Edge Experiential. Josh also returned to his first love filmmaking. His current position is as DePaul University’s Director of Innovation for the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, a role that brings together all of his experiences in design, filmmaking, and computing. He’s also currently in pre-production on his next film slated for 2025 release.

Josh, that doesn’t even cover a fraction of your background! Welcome to our podcast.

Josh Tsui:

Hey, Pat. Nice to see you again.

Pat Murphy:

Like me, you studied film and cinematography at college. What attracted you and got you into the world of gaming? Looking back on it now, you were well ahead of time, I think!

Josh Tsui:

Well, yeah. You know, not to toot my own horn, but I, I like to think so <laugh>.

I actually got into gaming a little by accident. This was in the early nineties. And, you know, computer graphics were just starting to get a little bit more democratised. It was still highly expensive to do it with silicon graphics machines that were tens of thousands of dollars back in the day. And so, you know, my film background came in handy around that period because computers like the Amiga came out were that allowed people like me to digitise video in a pretty, you know, fairly economical way and have fun with it inside of graphics programmes. So I got really into that towards the end of my college years.

And it just so happened that that was the era where digitised video became very big in video games, and especially with the first Mortal combat game. And so, you know, mortal Combat was made by a company out here in Chicago, and I was graduating from college, and I just got really lucky with the timing. They needed somebody who understood how to shoot people, how to light them and get them into the computer to manipulate them. And I was just one of those few people that had a pretty decent knowledge of how to do it.

So, next thing I know, I’m in video games and I’ve worked in video games for over 25 yearsafter that.

Pat Murphy:

You’re just getting paid for your hobby, aren’t you?

Josh Tsui:

Yeah I’ve been very lucky that throughout my career I’ve been able to work on projects that are very much related to my childhood. I was a big arcade game player back in the eighties, and so I got to work in video games. I used to skateboard growing up in Southern California, and I got to work with the Tony Hawk  Games and such. So yeah, I’ve  been very fortunate to just have all my hobbies become my professional career.

Pat Murphy:

Brilliant. Same as me by the way. I don’t think I’ve ever been paid <laugh> for work. I’ve been paid for my hobby every day in my life. I’ve never really done a proper day’s work in my life.

Look, the gaming industry is now worth hundreds of billions and is bigger than the film industry, even. Historically, a lot of trends and innovation in the commercial film industry has come from Hollywood and also Bollywood, but increasingly more from gaming. Was there ever a tipping point or a piece of innovation that changed that?

Josh Tsui:

Yeah, definitely, once what I call realtime 3D or runtime 3D became as visually appealing as something that you would see in a Pixar movie. You know, and this is something that’s, you know, that’s really happened probably within the last five years or so. Once that quality, once that video game quality be became so good that it looked like motion pictures, everything changed. And it was just a matter of time, even back in the early days of 3D games that I worked on, you know, they’re very primitive looking, but it was all a matter of time because it was all about horsepower, how fast the computer is, or how much more efficient the software can be. And so there was a tipping point where game engines such as Unreal and Unity, now were spitting out incredible looking images that are very rich and has great lighting, has ray tracing and everything that people were used to from having to render for hours, days, months.

Now it’s all in real time. And, and that really changed everything because suddenly it became less about video games and more about, well, how can we now use all this dynamic content that can be changed on the fly and use it for film, tv, and commercial purposes. And you’re seeing that, the most famous example is the show The Mandalorian, which is the first real mainstream show to start using and, and showing off what the capabilities are. And it just really has, you know, ripped open the industry in terms of what is possible.

Pat Murphy:

And the huge benefits of that. We were talking on one of our previous podcasts was using that technology in, in virtual production. In advertising, of course, the, the other big benefit, not just from a financial perspective, is, is the reduction of carbon footprint. You don’t need to go on locations and fly around and, and use hotels anymore. You can do that in an LED studio. It’s fantastic. And where do you think all this is going to end up then, Josh, ultimately?

Josh Tsui:

Boy, you know, the way I’m seeing the direction and the technology and, and even the craftsmanship of all of this is that, people are going to start making content – let’s say an environment for a video game. They can be repurposed in so many different ways, and modified and re-lit, and used from anything from video games to ads to film. And there’s gonna be a giant library of all of these assets out there for anybody to use. And it’s really, again, I say the democratisation of technology. It’s also the democratisation of assets. You know, you don’t have to build a physical set anymore. Somebody has made it, and now anybody on their desktop can adjust it to whatever their needs are. So if they’re, you know, if you’re doing a commercial that is, let’s say for a dishwasher that’s in a kitchen. That asset is out there and it can be freely available to anybody to modify however they need to. And anybody from somebody who’s making a very expensive commercial all the way down to a kid making a video game at home has access to that. And it, it’s pretty amazing how how that’s just gonna blow up all over the place.

Pat Murphy:

Well, look, when I think about the future of technology and personalisation, which we hear a lot about I ultimately go to that scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is walking down the street, his eyes are scanning, and relevant ads are served up to him there. Do you think that’s ever gonna be a reality?

Josh Tsui:

I believe so. I think it’s a reality now that people are already experiencing without realising it. Yeah. Obviously, Minority Report is the ideal situation. You know, there’s all kinds of privacy issues that, that it’s gonna come up with. And these are all solvable problems. But if you look at where we are now in the world, you go look at a product or you click on an ad on your browser, and next thing you know, you’re getting links from Amazon, you’re seeing these ads popping up onto various webpages as you’re going along. That’s a mini-version of what you saw in the Minority Report, because it’s tracking you, it’s tracking all your behaviour, how long you’re looking at an image on the screen, and it’ll serve you relevant advertising. The technology to do this in a Minority Report-type situation where you’re, let’s say you’re walking by a digital signage, and it knows who you are and serves up the ad for you.

The technology is all there, all the components are there. It’s just a matter of creatively putting it together. If you have a phone in your pocket and there is tracking, and it, you know, a beacon on the sign knows that you’re there and it can somehow get your data, whether it’s through facial recognition, through your social media activities, you know, whatever information on your phone that’s freely available. Again, privacy issues aside, if it can access that, then it knows everything that you’ve been doing for, let’s say the past few days and serves up the proper ads for it. It’s all there. It just needs to be figured out how to put together and obviously how to do it in you know, in a very ethical way.

Pat Murphy:

And that is all in a kind of a real life environment, but getting away from the real life environment like the Metaverse. Which is a hot topic, of course. Some say that it’s gonna change everybody’s lives, others just say it’s all hype, right? And it’s just advertising in video games. What’s your perspective on that?

Josh Tsui:

You know, my perspective on it is that somebody is going to create the metaverse that is gonna be functional and usable, and it’s likely going to be not something that we’re expecting. Right now, people’s concept of Metaverse is, you know they see a film like Ready Player One, you’re seeing, you know, VR headset, avatars, you know, everything that Meta is doing. And I think that is all very interesting. It’s the first step to what the metaverse eventually will be. But much like a lot of technology that we’re used to now, the early days look very different from what we ended up with. And so, I think right now it’s just – we’re seeing like the stereotypes of the Metaverse. <laugh>, I’m not gonna be the technological genius that’s gonna figure out where it’s gonna end up, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not what we’re literally seeing now.

There’s gonna be a piece of technology that’s going to make going into the Metaverse very easy, just as easy as me talking to you, or me going shopping on Amazon, you know, it’s, you know, the, the form factor of how that’s going to feel – it needs to be crafted for that experience. And so me putting on a cumbersome headset to go into Metaverse and logging in and all these different things and all that friction – that needs to go away, you know, it needs to be something like, I have a pair of glasses that are just as light as the pair that you have on there that you don’t mind wearing all day. And technology needs to get to a point where I can just turn it on and the glasses go right into video screens that allows me to be in that space and not worried about everything that is all connected to me.

So it has to have that comfort, and I think that it is, it is going to happen. I think it’s gonna way better looking and way better feeling that we currently have. And to go back to the concept of, you know, the Minority Report example. Once you get into that world, now tracking what you’re doing and, and serving up content, advertising, you know, all these things to your needs becomes much easier because you’re in the digital world, everything is now very much easy to track what you’re doing. That’s obviously an advertiser’s dream to be able to have that.

Pat Murphy:

And this is all gonna have a massive impact on, you know, kids growing up. Right? And my kids are already in things like Roblox and, and, and yeah, some of the other games. The nightmare of having to try and drag them away from the screen and get them to do real life experiences like fall out of trees, <laugh>. Do you think that there needs to be a kind of a balance between spending time on screen and then doing other things in real life?

Josh Tsui:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think despite what the technology is, there needs to be a balance on everything that we do. My kids are the same way. Yeah. Roblox is, you know, if you think about it, that’s like the, the gateway drug to the metaverse, you know? At the same time, you know, you’ll have people that may watch, you know, back in the day watching too much TV that they said that, you know, they call them ‘couch potatoes’ back in the day, which nowadays, you know, my kids are like, what the heck is the ‘couch potato’? Why would you wanna sit in front of the TV all day and just watch sports and, and movies and stuff. That to them is very strange too. So the concept of of balancing your time has been around a long time. And it’s up to us as parents to make sure that we’re making them do what they may not want to do, but they eventually enjoy it. They go out and get some fresh air and kick a ball. You know, it may <laugh>, it may be we may have to drag them into doing it, but once they do it, they have a lot of fun. And, you know, that’s the eternal struggle that we all have when we all, you know, as responsible parents wanna make sure that they have that balance.

Pat Murphy:

Talking about people growing up, you’re also involved in the education sector which puts you in touch with the generation that are coming into the industry. What is this younger generation looking for in terms of learning and skills and aspiration that you’re dealing with the new generation? What, what are they actually looking for?

Josh Tsui:

They’ve been looking for more about experiences and less about buying things. Especially coming out of the pandemic where workers are working from home, but you know, students they had to study remotely and such. And being younger people, you know, you’re at that age where socialising is very important. And so I think because of the pandemic, that desire to be amongst people is larger than ever. I work with a lot of students that are working in computing and video games and design and such. And while they love what they’re making, they’re really thinking about, ‘how can we extend this, this experience’?

You have VR, which is very much an individual type of activity. So is video games to a certain extent. And a lot of them are now thinking of ways of, if I learn how to do game design, if I learn how to make 3D assets, how can I use this for larger types of experiences? Like, you know, like a 360 theatre, can I do a giant insulation that can be outdoors that people can enjoy in the communal setting? And so it’s been great to see that type of thinking among them, because I’m also seeing that in the industry.

I come from an experiential design background, and that industry is booming because people want to go to concerts, they wanna go to shows, they wanna go to museums, but they wanna go there and be wowed a lot more than back in the day! So if I go to a natural history museum and I see, you know, stuffed animals, you know, or taxidermy, that’s fantastic and such, but can that be augmented with additional content, or is there a digital activation that’ll help me learn even more about what’s going on and make and make everything more dynamic? So it’s it is been e exciting to see that type of direction

Pat Murphy:

And their career paths are completely unknown! It’s not like, you know, in the old days where you kind of knew where you wanted to go, you wanna be a doctor, but you knew how to get there and all the different stages of how to get there. This is a first generation in this area. So there isn’t really a career, a career path, so to speak?

Josh Tsui:

Yeah. There really isn’t a straight path and I use myself as an example of this. I studied film, I ended up in video games, and then I ended up in experiential design, and now I’m directing an innovation centre. And it’s a giant non-linear mess of things, but it’s collecting experiences as I go. And so one of the things that I tell lot of the students is, you may be studying something now, but when opportunity comes to learn something new, and if it seems interesting, definitely go at it. If you’re studying film video, and there’s an opportunity to learn video game design, or video game production or technology, go look into it because you just never know what’s gonna happen.

And you collect this giant bag of experiences. So then once you’re out in the real world, so to speak, and, you know, and looking at jobs, you just never know what will catch on there. A lot of people say, well, you know, you don’t wanna be a jack of all trades. You do want to specialise in something. And it’s, and I, I do believe that. I just feel that anything you go after – be very deliberate about it and be as good as possible, you know, in, you know, with those elements.

Pat Murphy:

When we were talking the other day, you mentioned the example of the Mars m and m characters and the assets that might have been created for the TV being used for digital activity and vice versa. Clearly huge benefits from a cross-usage point of view, but often creative agencies want to create the right assets for each medium. How do we continue to show clients the possibilities in a way that doesn’t impact on creativity?

Josh Tsui:

Yeah, I think, you know, with that example, it really comes down to having somebody that is on the client’s team that is a – the best way to explain it, they’re usually a technical art director type, and they understand both the ‘art’ end of things. You know, how elements should look, but they also understand how it gets built. And so by knowing a little bit of both, they can look at something and see, ‘yes, I understand why you would do this for, you know, for let’s say for, you know, for video or, you know, something that’s not interactive’, but they understand that if you just did some slight little tweaks to it, you can then use that asset for so many different purposes. You don’t wanna constantly be, you know, reinventing the wheel.

And so it goes back to the, you know, the earlier example of you create these art assets and it gets used for, you know, for a lot of different purposes – that technique is getting more and more easier. Because, you know, before it was you, if you’re doing something for ads, it had to be very high end, but that’s not gonna play in the video game because video game, you know, back in the day, video game consoles weren’t as powerful.

Now its starting to get very much even. And so it very realistically, somebody creating something for advertising can take, can go into something interactive with very little adjustment. It just understanding what those adjustments are. So I think, you know, I think moving forward on things, I feel like it would be, it would not be the client’s best interest to not think about that. You know? And I think, you know, advertising and, and a lot of these production houses – they’re going to eventually need to understand how that works because it’s not cheap to make, to make these assets and these commercials and such. And so if they can understand that they can use it for so many different things it makes life so much easier.

Pat Murphy:

There’s been a lot of talk and news recently around AI and machine learning. Do you think this will turn into machine intelligence or is there a limit to what machine learning will be able to do? And they’ll always need to have some kind of human intervention. Where do you think this is going?

Josh Tsui:

These might be famous last words that’s gonna bite me, you know, in the future, <laugh>,

Pat Murphy:

I better remind you of this!!!

Josh Tsui:

<Laugh>. My personal feeling is that there will always be a need for human intervention because I look at AI as a very powerful tool. It’s it’s much like back in the day when, you know, when when photography came around and people said that it was going to replace painting, it’s like, ‘no, it didn’t replace painting. It, it’s ju it’s, it was its own medium. But what it did was it changed painting’. Yeah. It went from, you know, paintings went from, you know, the renaissance, whereas everything was very photorealistic. It then, you know, it get went into Impressionism and Cubish. It just, it started taking on new forms and photography obviously also, you know, also evolved too. So I think with AI, it’s going to change how people work. Let’s say in the example of of creating images or even cartoons, it’s gonna change the processes of things. Is it going to completely replace it? I don’t think so. I think that, you know, the fact that the AI works off of people feeding it information, the better the feed is, the better the AI is going to be. Yeah.

Pat Murphy:

Just another tool in the box actually that’s a little bit like Photoshop with was when it first came out. Exactly. It’s just another tool for, for people to use.

Talking of AI, I went into ChatGPT today and I asked it aa question, which was, ‘can you gimme some questions to ask Josh <laugh> about AI in production’? So I’ve got 10 questions here. I’m not gonna ask you all of these, but I’ve got top my top 10 countdown. I feel like I’m Casey Case, MRI and Seacrest. So I’m just gonna ask you one or two.

How is AI currently being used in advertising production? And what are some of the most significant benefits and challenges associated with its use?

Josh Tsui:

Wow. I think, I mean, I think there’s a lot of answers to that, but I think one use is definitely for starting off, I was almost gonna say storyboarding, but to be honest with you, I think it’s about just like structure of – what are the effective structures? You know, so we can look at thousands of ads and thousands of successful ads and look at what made them successful and spit you back an answer of, ‘Hey, here are some key elements ‘that now that’s gonna need fact checking. And now of course, this is one of the human element comes, you still need somebody smart to look through this and realise, ‘oh, no, no, this is way wrong’. You know, because it’s grabbing information off of the internet. And some, you know, obviously not everything is, is accurate on the internet. So that might be a good example.

Pat Murphy:

There’s two or three other things that I can remember as well. I saw something recently written about a piece of music that was written by AI and actually won a creative award, but they didn’t put it in as an AI created piece. It was done as a real human being, and it actually won an award. So that shows the power of this stuff.

So another question. What role do human creators play in advertising production when AI is involved, and how can they best work alongside these technologies?

Josh Tsui:

Oh, Again, this goes back to what you’re feeding it, so, the human interaction with AI is incredibly important because you need to tell the AI what you need. And then as it’s creating it, you need to have a discerning eye. You have to be very knowledgeable and critical about the feedback that you, that you know the information that you’re getting back and you’re constantly editing on a constant basis. And so a lot of times – again, I’ll use AI imagery. There are a lot of people that are having fun, you know, with stable diffusion and all these other tools, but they’re just going in, there’s say, ‘Hey, I, you know, I want a fish riding a bicycle.’

And so, and then you get a, you know, you get a weird fish riding your bicycle. Yeah. But I noticed that the, the best images, results come from people who have a critical eye. They’re looking at us like, ‘no, I want this. No, I, they understand, you know, they understand art history. Oh, I wanna base off of this period. I wanna base off of this style’. And that, you know, that’s coming from a human that knows this information.

And if they wanted to, they could probably create it themselves, but they wanna see what the results are, and they’re constantly working at it and going through iterations and such. And so that’s, you know, again, that goes back to – AI is a great tool, but if you’re not knowledgeable, if you don’t have, you know, if you don’t under don’t understand the craft, you’re only going to, you’re only gonna get back quality as good as you as a person are.

Pat Murphy:

And one of the questions that we don’t often ask or talk about when it comes to AI is what are the ethical considerations that arise when, when using these kind of technologies?

Josh Tsui:

Yeah. That’s evolving a lot based off of what I’m reading, because it’s taking things off of publicly available, you know, information. So there’s a lot of copyright issues. And, you know, I know that there are certain guardrails that are, that they’re trying to put up, you know, for copyright purposes.

Ethically – boy, there’s so many different things! I think one of the issues is going to be that you as the person working with the tool have to understand – at least try to figure out where some of the, the sources are coming from, you know, because if it’s, if it’s directly taking images from something that’s that’s copywritten. You need to be smart enough to know at least how to track it down. Or at least, you know, if you’re suspicious of it, you need to find out, you know, where is this coming from. But, you know, I wish I had a concrete for that, because it’s moving so fast. And it’s one of those things, it’s one of those Pandora’s boxes.

Pat Murphy:

And you’re in a university, so when your students send you their thesis… will you have an idea of whether it’s written using AI?

Josh Tsui :

Yeah. And that’s the thing that, that comes down to the human element of reading something or looking at something and  having the intuition to think, ‘how was this exactly put together’?

And this comes back to, again, the human human interaction with people is, you know, I would go to the students and say, ‘all right, this is very interesting. There’s something off about this. Tell me how you got to this point. Did you double check this’? Because in this day and age, I don’t think it’s gonna be unexpected to have students or people using AI to help their work. I think it is just gonna happen. Just be like, you know, back in the nineties, googling something and finding an article and copy and pasting it. And such. And so it’s gonna come down to us talking to them. Say, ‘all right, let’s talk through this. Did you, you know, what was your process and how, you know, and how did you actually absorb this information and, and bring it up’.

Pat Murphy:

Tell us about your film.

Josh Tsui:

Oh, my so I produced a a feature link documentary called Insert Coin, and it’s a it’s about Midway Games out here in Chicago, which was back in the nineties, a small group of crazy people, <laugh> and who, who basically got together to make video games in the back of a pinball factory. And they, they ended up creating, you know, just iconic franchises such as Mortal Combat, NBA Jam. They did the Terminator 2 games. That was a huge hit. And I, that was my first job out of college, was working at that studio. And even back then, I kind of felt like I was in the middle of history being made because the first Mortal Combat came out, and it was just a phenomenon just right off the bat. So that was many years ago. And, you know, I, yeah, I went to film school. I never got to make a film because I got <laugh>. I got into video games, and so I really wanted to make a documentary, and this seemed like a perfect subject for it. And so I, I made this film, I got SXSW in 2020 you know, numerous film festivals, and now it’s available on, you know, on streaming platforms everywhere.

Pat Murphy:

And you’re working on a new one as well?

Josh Tsui:

Yeah, yeah. I’m working on a new one. I can’t talk too much about it, but it’s, it is relate, it is tangentially related to video games also, but I, but it, it’s it gets into everything from video games, to sports entertainment, to taxpayers dollars paying for, you know, subsidising entertainment and sports and everything wrapped up around that. So I’m very excited about it.

Pat Murphy:

Fantastic. Well, I mean, I know that you’ve got that potentially slated for 25. Yeah. So I’ve got a couple of years away, but I wish you all the very best of luck with that and success as well. Now before we disappear off. Tell us what your favourite ad of all time is.

Josh Tsui:

There are a lot of ads that come to mind, obviously. But you know, one of the ones that I feel like people don’t know enough about is an is an ad for apples McIntosh back in the eighties. Now everyone thinks about 1984, directed by really Scott. You know, and that was, you know, an iconic advertisement. But a lot of people don’t realise that. And I believe it was the following year in, in 85, I’ll fact check that. But after that, there was another Super Bowl ad that was directed by Tony Scott, Ridley Scott’s brother, and it was, and it was called Lemmings. And it was a fantastic, beautiful commercial for the McIntosh where they had all of these people in business attire walking through this grassy field, and they’re whistling Whistle While You Work from Disney’s Snow White, and you, you’re seeing them walking along this mountainside, and then, and then you start realising that they’re all falling off of a cliff one by one.

And it’s just beautifully shot, just creepy as, you know, creepy as heck and such. And then, and then suddenly one person gets at the edge of the cliff and he stops and he takes off his blindfold. I forgot to mention they’re all blindfolded as they’re falling off the cliff and takes off his blindfold and realises that, that they’re all jumping to their doom. And he stops and he turns around and he sees a giant line of people behind them, and then it goes to black, and then it’s, you know, and then I think it says like Apple Macintosh or something like that.

And it was just so powerful. It was just so beautiful because it was just you didn’t know what was going to happen until at the very end. And then you get this kinda sense of sense of doom right there. And it was just, it was just beautifully made.

Pat Murphy:

And it’s not a film that, you know, many people remember. So it’s great that you’ve kind of, you know, reminded yourself that, cause everyone remembers the first one, don’t they? From, from Ridley.

Josh Tsui:

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I, you know, and obviously the, you know, date in 1984 was, is beautiful. But I would say that when people see the Lemmings one, I, I think that it’s on par, if not better than the 1984 ad!

Pat Murphy:

Great stuff. And we’ll be posting that up on our prodcast website as well. So take a look at that if you get a chance. Look, Josh, thank you so much for being on the prodcast today. Really appreciate it.

Josh Tsui:

Oh, no, it’s always great talking to you. Thanks for having me.

Pat Murphy:

I wanna say big thanks to Josh Tsui for taking some time to talk to me today. It has been a real insight into the world of gaming. I could have talked for hours and we’ve obviously heard what’s going on in his world of production and what’s new and innovative in our industry.

To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com where you’ll find details on all of the guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes as well. If you’d like to feature on the prodcast or have any comments, questions, or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com. I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, of which all the links are in the notes of this episode. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks again to my friend, Josh here, my team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media.

Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.