The week after I was in Sonoma shooting for Audi I found my self the chronicler of yet another massive production down in LA. This time it was for a teaser campaign for the upcoming Gears of War 3. This made me very happy because I'd done work for both of the first two games, and I'm somewhat of a completest. So it felt only right to be involved with this one in some way.
This time around, however, I wasn't directly involved with the campaign itself. I was the guy running around the set detailing all the 'Making Of' portion of the project. Basically my task was to make friends with the production crew, and shoot everything. Which I did! 3 full days on set, hanging out with the art department, getting to know the camera crew, BSing with the pryo guys! so much fun and I was soaking up everything like a sponge!
Promo Site my team and I worked on for the launch of Kinect Sports Season 2.
Jake Hawley, Tori Main, and Danny O. on 3d and Motion graphics for the station indents. Mindy McCutchen and Intern Julie (who was thrown straight into the deep end with this one) on editorial. I did the motion for the various pop-up windows and lower 3rds along with all the green screen work.
First big project of the new year was the first round of post-launch promotions we were doing for the Xbox: Kinect. The project was called "Fun That's Good for You" and it centered around a young woman playing the various Kinect titles. As she plays various elements from the games appear around her.
I've done this sort of thing before. There've been severalprojectsovertheyears I've worked on that involved people interacting with elements from Xbox titles. What made this one special was that I was tasked with handeling the project from pre-pro all the way through to final compositing and international localization. Almost instantly this went from "one more compositing job" to "Directorial Debut".
We shot the whole thing against white at Studio 1550 in the Dogpatch.
We used a RED ONE with the Mysterium censor and a set of Arriflex Primes from Chater Camera over in Berkeley (seen here with our DP Steve Condiotti).
After the shoot, I was all on my own for post production. I had a few days to get all five of the edits done and then about a week and a half for compositing and finishing. 3d was all done in Maya. Since most of the shots that involved direct contact with the objects were very brief, I matched the animation by hand. We used green sticks for placement reference which helped a lot for the javelin shot.
Everything not done in Maya was in After Effects. This included lots of tracked type and a generous helping of Particular.
Overall, I learned a lot from the experience. I learned that being able to point out flaws in a shot during post in no way makes you capable of avoiding them during production. I also learned just how helpful it can be to have an accurate camera report. And most importantly, I learned that I really enjoy directing. The day was hectic, but the fun kind of hectic, and I hope to get more opportunities like this in the coming months.
For now, you can check out the finished project here.
After the success of the Believe and Iris campaigns a few years back, along with Gears of War 2 last year, Xbox once again tasked my office with doing the online marketing for their next AAA title: Halo ODST. In this game you play as the rookie on a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (get it?) as you make your way through a myriad of levels killing aliens, saving humanity, and blah, blah, every first person shooter you've ever played.
While the game itself may play out like Halo 3.5, the site and production that went into it took our team marching into all sorts of brave new territories. The site revolves around an interface which allows the user to review interview footage of the 3 members of the ODST team you fight alongside in the game. During each interview, the soldiers are instructed to put a device on their head that allows you to see what they're thinking.
The interviews were shot on a sound stage in LA and were later matched up with b-roll, shot in both Budapest and SF. My role in all of this was to work alongside my co-worker and friend Jeremiah Wassom, and support his effort to assemble the video feeds of the thoughts / memories. Since he'd been brought into the project earlier and was on-set in Budapest his role was to ensure the interview questions matched up with the memories we'd planned on producing.
While he was laying out time lines and establishing timing, I took over the visual effects work for individual shots that would be part of these memories. initially we'd planned on having 4 shots, only 1 of which was anticipated to involve 3d motion tracking and animating game models.
By the end of the project we had 10 vfx shots, 5 of which involved some tricky matchmoving, and 3 of those included animating models from the game into the shots. In all of these cases, I tracked the shots using PFTrack, animated and textured some of the game assets in Maya, and composited it all together in After Effects.
Pelican
Tribute
Covenant Sky
Probably the most complicated of the shots I worked on was the Banshee Attack. While initially this shot seemed to be an easy track, it turned out to be an incredibly difficult shot. In fact, due to a crazy exposure shift and the smoke that felt it had the right to casually waft through the shot, I never actually tracked the entire shot in one continuous take. Instead the shot was broken into 2 parts, before and after the banshee explodes. The explosion was done using footage from Detonation Films, and the rocket and contrails were done using Trapcode Particular.
Banshee Attack
The shot was later cut down to accommodate client request (and cover up the fact we had nothing for him to be shooting at when the camera panned back down).
After individual shots were finished and placed into their respective timelines they were treated with a process that jeremiah came up with to scramble them up and add that digital noise that's so indicative of a scrambled digital signal.
the last step of the project was to animate the various EKG / Brain activity meters that needed to reflect the soldiers stress levels as related to their memories.
At the end of the day, this turned out to be the kind of project I love. I got my hands dirty doing things like shooting extra assets and making a bomb (turns out everything I know about explosives comes from the Die Hard Movies), I pulled just about every compositing trick I could think of out of my hat. and walked away with a whole bunch of work I'm really proud of.
My role in this was creating the planet itself in Maya and creating the transitions to the surface which had to seamlessly flow into actual footage captured from the game itself.
It's always good to finally be far enough removed from a project you worked on so closely to see the whole picture and realize that it's something you're really proud of. I had a moment like that today when the Awards submission site for the Gears of War 2 project I worked on went live. It has a campaign overview video that I cut together on it, as well as clips and links to the various pieces of the puzzle and the experience site itself.
The Last Day is an experiential website that takes you through a destroyed city on the day that humanity burrows underground to fight The Locust. Viewed from the point of view of JACK, Marcus Fenix's companion robot, who awakens to find himself in the midst of destruction.
This project probably pushed me farther out on a limb than I've ever been before. Reason being that we were tasked with creating the entire experience with in game graphics, and that we were going to have to build all of our assets with the Unreal 3 development engine. As the only member of my team with any real experience doing any kind of 3d production I was picked to receive training.
I spent a week training Alex Okita at Black Point Studios in SOMA. After 5 days of intense learning I came back to my office and over the next month built all the navigational assets for the site and provided assets to several other artists to be assembled into various content pieces for the site.
The environment in the site is a manipulated version of a previously assembled level. The bulk of my time was spent rearranging and retexturing objects, re-lighting the scene, and animating the camera. Another mandate was that we never show a "still frame", meaning that every time the camera stopped on an object there had to be a looping background video available. All in all there are 26 stopping points.
My two favorite shots from this project are the final lockup of the sunset and the reflection of JACK in the side of the van in a pile of rubble. The sunset was a favorite because It involved a fair amount of polishing after we got a render out of the unreal engine. The reflection is a favorite because in involved a fair amount of roto and matchmoving to get it to look right. Below I've posted a video of the complete fly through without any of the programatic distortion that was done in flash.
There's more content pieces and shot breakdowns to come, but for now I'd recommend that everyone should get the full experience and check out the site.
So a few weeks ago the site I've been working on for the last few months went live. I've held off until now because when it first launched there wasn't much to look at other than to scroll through the navigation.
now, a few weeks later, about half of the content is unlocked. Give it a look and check back after the game comes out on November 7th to see a full post (with video) of everything I worked on for this project.
My work here was part of the experiential site for the first Gears of War game. In this site you're looking through the eyes of Marcus Fenix who's in jail remembering the events that led him to being incarcerated through a series of cryptic flashbacks.
This was my first project where I was leading the video production. This could have something to do with the fact that I was the only guy doing any of the video production work, but I like to think that's cuz they wanted to give me a trial by fire.
My task was to create videos for the 4 different flashbacks. This was very much a precursor project to the Iris work I did for Halo 3, in that I was given a selection of stock footage, game footage, and a dev kit to capture more game footage from. What I couldn't get from that wound up either being quickly made in Maya or got composited together from high res concept art.
One of the cool things about this project is that Epic Games gave us the entire sound library from the game. So when you're hearing the sound effects and the Locust are screaming at you, you're actually hearing what you would hear in the game. The VO is mostly made up of talent we pulled from our office, with a few choice tracks of Marcus and Dom scattered throughout.
I spent 2 weeks on this project. The last 4 days were spent working without sleep, at the end of which my body just about gave up on me and I came down with what is to date the worst cold/flu/debilitating sick feeling I've ever had. I actually tried to come in and keep working but was turned away with the same kind of regard people used to give to leper. I took the hint and ended up relinquishing the last few corrections of work to my good friend Caio who added the finishing touches to the gritty masking effect and handed off final assets to the developers.
Immediately following the work I did on the IRIS campaign I started getting briefed on Believe. This was to be the experiential site that was going to accompany a larger TV campaign. The Agency in charge of the TV spots had commissioned New Deal Studios to build a 30x40 foot diorama of the Battle of New Mombasa (where Master Chief saved the day... yet again) which was populated with several hundred figurines made by Stan Winston Studios.
The whole thing was shot on 2 motion control rigs over 2 days. The footage was then stitched together and had the sky roto'd out.
My involvement was doing the sky replacement (including learning how to do 3d tracking with no prior experience), roto for the various rotating characters that appear when you click one of the floating icons, and the motion tracking for all the clickable hotspots in the timeline.
CREDITS: Executive Creative Director: Rei Inamoto Creative Director: John Jakubowski Associate Creative Director: Thiago Zanato Tripodi Creative Lead: Hoj Jomehri Art Director: Kevin Hsieh Copywriters: Joel Kaplan/ Keith Hostert Creative Developer: Jason Gatt Title Sequence: Caio Lazzuri Senior Designer: Alex Lyman Motion Designer: Matt Law Associate Motion Designer: Rian Devos Producer: Nancy Cardillo/ Larry Ewing Senior Technical Project Manager: Kirk Kepley Group Account Director: Simon Jefferson Account Director: Erica Power Senior Account Executive: Nicole Biondi Diorama: New Deal Studios (Director - Matt Gratzner) Figurines: Stan Winston Studio Sound Design: Richard Devine
This was another project for Xbox. It involved a lot of actors drawing illustrated objects in the air. The bulk of my involvement in this project was in the planning stages to figure out the most effective way to achieve the drawing effect given the limited in house resources and budget available to us.
The method we decided on was to do point tracking in after effects and use Trapcode Particular to emit a trail of particles for the line writing. For some of the larger objects in the site we just made the trails wider and used them to mask on pre composed objects and type.
In the end I wound up only producing 2 of the final shots (seen below). Both shots are for idol loops that play when the site has been sitting undisturbed for a bout a minute or so. These are only 2 of about 12 that were embedded in the final sight. So if you're looking for these in the actual site, it may take a while.
Iris is one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on. By the time it got to me the idea and structure had been flushed out but all I got was "we're going to make an ARG, it will be long and complicated, and at the end of each part we want there to be a video being played through an alien server."
When they asked for that they had no idea what anything was going to look like. The server, the environment it was housed in, and the video itself were all up for grabs. So I along with my immediate supervisor set about designing the actual servers themselves. We each came up with 4 different designs, and internally decided on 1 that could be subtly modified and repeated to create 5 different servers. Mine didn't get chosen which meant I was tasked with the rest of the materials needed to make the servers.
This turned out to be the best job I could have ever hoped for. I wound up being put in charge of all the environments that the servers would be housed in as well as all of the content videos that would play when the user figured out which symbol to click on.
There were Five in total. For the most part they were edited with Final Cut Pro, and tweaked, colored, and effected in After Effects. When the videos called for assets that couldn't be bought as stock footage, or shot locally, I wound up doing some work in Maya to fill in the gaps.
