A while ago, one of our fantastic Pirate101 players and KingsIsle blog reader left this comment on the blog:
My little sister and I play all the time and we are from Wales. We have always wondered if the actress that voices Sarah Steele is from Wales too? We love her accent as it is close to ours. Ours is like a cross between hers and Bonnie Annes but more Sarahs.
We do our best to answer any questions you guys post to us, and when Ashley Spillers, the voice of Sarah Steele, was in the KingsIsle offices recently to do some recording we had a chance to ask her these questions! Here’s what Ashley had to say:
Hello there, Greetings from Los Angeles, California!
Thank you so much for your sweet note all the way from Wales! I would be very happy to answer the questions you sent for you and your sister.
My name is Ashley Spillers and I am the voice of Sarah Steele – I am so happy that you enjoy her! I have a blast playing her so I am happy to know you’ve found a friend in her. Regarding your questions: I am in fact not from Wales, but actually from Texas! I am so glad to hear that Sarah’s accent sounds somewhat authentic; as I am always concerned it’s not!
I am now living in Los Angeles, California pursuing my acting career, where I get to work on film, and voiceover work! I love theater as well.
I came into voice acting via theater and film acting! I have always been told I have a “funny” voice, so now I can finally put it to good use! It’s not always easy to land jobs, but I just continue to audition and record just like all the other actors, and hope someone chooses me.
Thank you again for your interest in my work and Sarah Steele! I wish you the very best and hope you continue to find lots of joy with Sarah and all the other wonderful characters in the game.
Cheers! and be well,
love Ashley Spillers
– and may you always find joy in whatever you do – and don’t give up on your dreams!
Here’s a photo of me waving to you from LA! 🙂
Ashley’s hard work in acting has paid off as she’s recently starred in Hollywood movies with Academy Award winners like Robert DeNiro. You can read more about Ashley’s film roles here. Thanks for answering our questions Ashley! You can learn more about Sarah Steele in Pirate101 by watching the Rogue’s Gallery video below!
Here at KingsIsle, we’ve had pets on the brain lately… I wonder why that could be? Regardless, we wanted to showcase some of our furry (and not so furry) friends on the blog!
This is my pet tarantula, Rosie. She’s an Orange Knee Tarantula, very friendly and a great companion. She loves the finer things in life like fine dining on Texas crickets, listening to her favorite band Rush and basking in the warmth of our Texas sun.
Fred Howard – Vice President of Marketing
Benny only moves at two speeds: asleep and lightspeed. He’s a Boston Terrier and knows a variety of tricks in both English and Korean, such as twirl, roll over, and high-five. He also loves eating lettuce and carrots.
Carl McKevitt – Game Designer
Meet Elvis, a 50/50 California King Snake. Her favorite thing is swimming in her pool. Also, meet the twins, Maui (back) and Moscow (front). Maui’s favorite things are brushing his Mom’s hair and nibbling on wheatgrass. Moscow’s favorite things are snuggling with his Dad at bedtime and finding new ways to sneak food off plates.
Leah Raymer – Purchasing & Inventory Specialist
This is Simon, my best buddy! He helps me travel 40% faster than walking 😉 Simon is a seven year-old OTTB, which stands for “Off the Track Thoroughbred.” That means he was bred to be a race horse, but was too slow! I am training him to be a hunter/jumper show horse. His favorite thing to do is jump fences and make silly faces at me!
Lauren Mauldin – Marketing Website Producer
Charlie is my little yellow tabby bobcat and is probably the funniest cat anyone could have adopted. He’ll come up for some love, and meow his thoughts on the world and life and such, and then bolt off to do backflips from the bed. He’s a purr machine, too. Kirby is the regal one in the family. He sleeps under the covers, enjoys a good belly rub every so often, and is one handsome little devil, to boot. They’re pretty much best pals. They’re my little furry buds, and it’s nice to come home to them every day, enjoy a short one-sided conversation, and get some relaxing couch-time in together.
Chris Kokkinos – Sound Designer
IguanaDonna is her name. She is about 5 or 6 years old, a little more than 5 feet long and just under 10 lbs. She takes a bath in the tub almost every day and loves to swim in it, although she is getting so big we might need a tub upgrade. Her enclosure is about the size of twin bunk beds and it has multiple levels with lighting toys, a water dish and humidifier. She hates to be on her leash, but occasionally we take her out with us, a few times here in the office even.
Joel White – Senior Game Designer
This is my dog, Zoe. We adopted her from the Humane Society when she was a puppy. She likes walks, belly rubs, and cheddar cheese.
Sara Jensen Schubert – Design Lead
Mirin is a Bambino, which is a hairless cat with little legs! But don’t let that fool you, he jumps and plays like any other cat. His favorite game is fetch, just like some dogs! Mirin aspires to one day have a snazzy suit like Meowiarty so he can be suave and sophisticated too.
Phred Newman – Pirate101 QA
You know, we had sooooo many pets that we couldn’t show them all without including this super collage of cool KingsIsle pets! Enjoy these photos of many more of our wond’arrful pets!
A short while back, I wrote part one on the making of commercials here at KingsIsle which covers how we make our CGI spots. In part two, I will delve into our recent Wizard101 tournaments spot where for the first time in KingsIsle history we used live actors and a real set for a portion of the commercial.
The starting process for using live action in a commercial is almost identical to how we start a CGI commercial. We have to come up with the overall message of the spot, the storyboards and script. However, from there it gets more complicated as it is like producing two separate commercials (one CGI and one live action) that had to work together with a perfectly smooth transition.
We outlined the four Wizards we wanted to use on the “featured” team. Our goal was to use the Ice and Myth Wizards from our last CGI commercials plus two additional ones. In casting the actors it made for a fun duel process. We needed to find a male and female actor that embodied the Wizards from the previous CGI commercials. We then had to find two actors (one male and one female) that would be the foundation to model the two additional CGI Wizards, one Death and one Fire. It is a fascinating process looking at video castings of so many young actors and really trying to pick out just the right ones. I lost track of how many hours we spent looking for “perfect fits” to be the first ever live action Wizards 🙂
Getting the clothing right was another fun effort. I really wanted to make sure the actors were wearing cool clothes that you would see in the halls of any high school. However, they also had to have a close resemblance to the Wizard101 outfits that the CGI characters would wear in the arena. We knew the color combinations but it was really hard to know how it would work until the actor actually has the outfit on. The day before the commercial shoot we all got together and walked through all the details. This was also when we had each of the actors try on all of the various outfits to figure out exactly the right ones to wear.
Another thing we had to really focus on to get right was the actual location to shoot the commercial. I wanted a locker room feel but one that could just as easily be in our world or in the Spiral. This was a harder thing to find than you might think. We ended up shooting the commercial at a really cool stadium in the Dallas area that had great concrete floors and columns. We had the lockers custom built based on how we thought they might look in a real Wizard101 stadium. We also had the stone benches custom built (side note, they’re now a permanent addition to the KingsIsle offices). A lot of the employees wanted fun items in the commercial so I brought a box of items in to act as “props” on the shelves of the spot. I won’t list all of the items but some of them included Marleyben (the marketing team mascot), a bottle of Falmea hot sauce a fan had sent in, and my old school original clapping monkey from the 1950’s.
The day of the commercial shoot was a whirlwind. There was a huge crew there setting up lights and cameras, dressing the actors and getting their hair and make-up done and a whole flurry of other activity. Once everything was in place we started shooting footage. There was a cool “mist” machine that helped set the ambiance. An interesting aspect was how many shots we had to take to get the short footage actually used in the commercial. This is because there is no second chance to get another shot if we find in production we don’t have what we want. I’ll also call out at this point that I got to have my first appearance in a national commercial. Yep, I played one of the door guards for the Wizards entering the arena. I can hear what you are thinking – “Wow, that was one amazing piece of acting that you did…” 🙂
Once all the footage is captured there was still a huge amount of work to do. We had to take hours’ worth of shots and condense it down to the roughly 15 seconds you saw in the commercial. We had to make sure there was continuity to all the shots – if an actor’s hood was up in one cut, it was the same way in the next cut. Of course we also had to do all the sound effects and post production effects. Our internal KingsIsle sound team is amazing and they really did a great job with this commercial.
Truth be told, I was extremely nervous about using live actors and shooting lives scenes for a KingsIsle commercial. There were a lot of additional risks to adding live action for us. Would we pick the right actors? Would the set look appropriate and have a feel that crosses both our world as well as the world we’ve created in the spiral. Perhaps most importantly, would the live action come across with the believability we feel is so important? Overall I think we were able to navigate through all of these risks and create a commercial I was really proud of but I would love to hear your thoughts. Did you like the commercial? Should we consider using live action again in the future?
Fred Howard
Vice President of Marketing
With launching our second major game in October, it’s become a bit of a tradition here at KingsIsle to have a big Halloween party! Last year, we celebrated the launch of Pirate101 with a spook-tacular bash, and this year we decided another costume party was in order.
KingsIsle employees get very enthusiastic with costumes each year. There’s a Halloween costume contest that is always very competitive! Other highlights are a green-screen where friends can gather for photos and then pick fun backgrounds like a favorite choice, a Pirate101 tavern!
Of course no party is complete without food and music. We enjoyed a variety of music from several DJs while nibbling on pizza and sipping some Yum-n-ade!
The atmosphere was spooky scary with Halloween video clips projected onto the walls of our location. Guests who wanted to get a glimpse into their future could also visit the Tarot Card reader. Did she predict some cool new stuff in our future? Hmm… 🙂
We had a great time getting together to celebrate our favorite fall holiday as well as the Pirate101’s 1st Birthday! We hope all you Wizards and Pirates out there have a safe and enjoyable holiday. Happy Halloween from everyone at KingsIsle Entertainment!
Today by blog reader request, we have a little bit more background on the villains of Wizard101! Alhazred and King Artorius, our Wizard101 writers, have shared some insight into the makings of Malistaire and Morganthe.
In the earliest story development of Wizard101, it was important that the villain be memorable. The name was easy: “malice” + “stare” = “evil eye.” If you notice, Malistaire’s robe is covered with evil eyes. Visually, he’s a dead-ringer for his brother Cyrus, emphasizing his evil-ness, but he also evokes classic villainy, with his dark robe, black eyes and fingernails, and sinister facial hair. His personality is similar to his brother’s, but even less friendly.
However, looks aren’t everything!
Making a memorable villain meant that Malistaire could not be completely unsympathetic or evil. He had to have a tragic aspect, and a motive that made sense. So Malistaire has tragedy to spare. He lost his wife Sylvia to a horrible disease. Their marriage was the combination of life and death, a perfect cycle, but with her gone, all he had was his sorrow, which drove him mad.
Unlike most stereotypical villains, Malistaire’s plan doesn’t involve getting revenge on those who did him wrong or causing mayhem to spread the pain around. Instead, he is single-handedly focused on recovering a magical book and awakening a power that will aid him in restoring his wife to the world of the living once more. The other professors at Ravenwood, Sherlock Bones, the Emperor of MooShu, and the player Wizard are all just obstacles to Malistaire’s end-goal. If he could get what he wants without dealing with any of them, he would.
Ultimately, if Malistaire could have anything in the Spiral, it would be to reunite with his wife again, as if nothing had happened.
That’s not such a terrible thing to ask for, is it?
If you agree, then we did our job right.
Morganthe, on the other hand, came from a desire to shake things up a bit. We wanted a new villain for our next big story arc. She had to be more ruthless, with a bigger goal in mind, but just as memorable as Malistaire. But since the stakes had to be higher than just incidentally risking destroying the Spiral to bring someone back from the dead, this time Morganthe’s threat had to be more deliberate.
However, she comes from a similar place as Malistaire, someone who has lost and feels wronged. Once she was a promising student of Merle Ambrose’s back in Avalon, and she followed Ambrose to be his first student in Ravenwood. However, she was never content to learn at the slow pace he dictated. She knew she was smart enough and clever enough to handle the most dangerous types of magic, despite Merle Ambrose’s warnings and restrictions. But she was wrong—she made a tragic mistake and nearly destroyed Wizard City, and thus Merle Ambrose and the other professors were forced to take away her magic and expel her from Ravenwood.
Like Faust, Morganthe sought knowledge that was denied to her, and went over the line when she was thwarted. From there, her ambitions have grown so vast she wishes to force the whole Spiral to bend to her whims, to prove that she was right all along.
Her name, Morganthe, comes from a few places. It has its roots in Welsh and Old English, evoking King Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. A “morganatic” marriage is a marriage of political convenience in which the child inherits nothing, which also seemed to make thematic sense, as Morganthe feels like she is denied her true heritage… that is deserved to her.
From the beginning, even before finalizing her name, we wanted her to be the queen of the Shadow Web, and with that, it only made sense to give her a shadow/spider theme. On a more real-world note, Morganthe is a dead-ringer for the actress who voices her, which always helps when writing dialogue.
So that’s a look behind the Wizard101 curtain.
Speaking of curtains, Morganthe’s storyline will sometime draw to a close and the Spiral will survive her diabolical plan (we hope!). After that, the player Wizard will encounter new worlds and even new realms of magic.
Somewhere, though… will be a villain.
Who will it be?
Alhazred and King Artorius
Wizard101 Creative Designers
KingsIsle Blog 