Welcome to Warhammer
40,000's dark, futuristic fantasy universe and its warlike inhabitants!
Through an intense, tactical battle between legions of alien warriors
created in CG by Blur Studio, players are introduced to THQ's new
game title Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. Described as
'a piece of computer animation rivaling a blockbuster feature film
in production value and dramatic quality', the cinematic is a quick-paced
180 seconds worth of footage both engaging for new players and
thrilling for Warhammer's existing fan base. Leonard Teo speaks
to Paul Taylor and Dave Wilson (CG
Supervisors, Blur Studio) about their work on the cinematic and
the passion Blur wrought into it.
Who are Paul Taylor and Dave Wilson,
and how were you involved in the Warhammer 40,000 cinematics?
Dave Wilson: I have been here at Blur
Studio about two years and Paul's been here forever! Paul
and I were the CG supervisors on Dawn of War. Paul handled the
Story/Layout and Animation Supervision as well as directing the
motion capture performance, while I took care of the Modeling,
Lighting and Compositing. Kirby Miller was our FX supervisor
and Tim Miller was the Creative Director on the project.
Tell us about the Dawn of War cinematics.
What's the story, how did you guys end up doing the cinematics?
Were you given a script and designs or was there total creative
freedom involved?
Dave Wilson: We do a lot of Game Cinematics every
year at Blur, and we've worked with THQ before
on a couple of projects. They talked with Relic
Entertainment about having us do the intro cinematic. We got
a script from Relic/THQ with their initial ideas for the intro.
From the outset our biggest concern was the timeframe. We had roughly
3-4 weeks to complete the piece. But after reading the script – and
being huge Warhammer
40,000 fans ourselves – we just couldn't turn it down.
Our passion and primary goal presently at Blur is to create feature
length CG films. Cinematics like Dawn of War, especially
ones where we have an active role in the sculpting the story and
action, are a great way for us to evolve our pipeline towards long-format
storytelling. Over the last few years we have really structured
our pipeline so we can produce high quality work really efficiently. Dawn
of War is a great example in that we were able to take it
from script and storyboards to final composites in under a month.
The talent at Blur never ceases to astound me. We keep trying
to raise the bar and better our work with each project we undertake.
The talent and tools we now have at Blur have really allowed us
to take our work to the next level, and allow us to concentrate
on creating truly engaging and filmic projects.
Relic was very accommodating with incorporating our own ideas
into the piece. Obviously we had to stay true to the Warhammer
40,000 universe, but they allowed us the freedom to just make things
as cool as we possibly could. So for the first week of the project
we just bounced script ideas back and forth and started prepping
the layout work. We had to wait a week for the Dawn of War team
to finish up on their current projects before they could get started.
So we used that time to knock the animatic out of the park and
get it started. David Nibbelin did our animatic work on Dawn of
War, and after we sat down and had a look at what he'd done we
knew it was going to be a great piece. It looked awesome already
and got the whole team geared up for the intro.
Paul Taylor: I knew from Relic's initial script
that these guys were going to stay true to the spirit of the Warhammer
40,000 Universe. I'm a HUGE geek fan of the Warhammer 40,000 table
top game. I have an ork army that I've slaved over with a tiny
paint brush and crossed eyes. So, to me, staying true meant a lot
of tactical fighting and close combat – melee carnage. In my opinion
game cinematics can be, well, boring. They tend to cut away from
the action just when it's getting good or even worse, they do long
pans with voiceover. Yuck. Or worst of all, they try to tell a
'story' which usually translates into characters standing around
flapping their gums spouting a lot of boring dialog. At the very
beginning of the project Rob Cunningham (Relic) and I spent a couple
days going back and forth on the phone to work out the story points,
condensing redundant shots, and trimming out expensive shots. For
example, originally there was going to be a looted Leman Russ ork
tank rolling down on the space marines. But given the compressed
schedule, we had to axe it (so to speak). After we brainstormed
and trimmed off the fat, Rob roughly sketched some killer storyboards
that had a lot of energy. |
