‘Mark of Chaos’ is one of those absorbing games that draws the player into a world chock full of legend, fiery battles and gore. When the Budapest crew took on the project for the Warhammer cinematic trailer, they knew that both a good understanding of what the client wanted, and the development of a good workflow, would help them along the way.
Digic Pictures’ production of the Warhammer ‘Mark of Chaos’ intro took six months with 25 people involved. “Everybody did a great job and deserves to be mentioned individually,” says Gabor Marinov, Creative Producer. Marinov is speaking from Budapest, where the CG industry has recently been given new lease on life. He enthusiastically introduces me to his close crew.
Requires CGTalk or CGSociety Membership & QuickTime 6
Download full resolution BitTorrent file (111Mb) here
Istvan Zorkoczy was the director of ‘Mark of Chaos’, and has been with Digic pretty much from the beginning. Before Warhammer, he directed four other Digic productions, for the game called ‘Armies of Exigo’. He found the client liaison the most pleasing part of the story boarding and production. “We were extremely lucky in regards to having blind trust from Namco and Games Workshop about creating the story,” Zorkoczy begins. “Our only restriction was to base the story on an epic battle. We were overjoyed by this freedom, but anyone who is familiar with the size and diversity of the world of Warhammer knows that it’s high pressure. It is overwhelming to select species, characters and situations from the multitude of elements that have been developed for decades. We explored a variety of synopses, in which several races and characters appeared. Erik Mogensen, from Games Workshop, helped the producing process all along with very detailed information. His devoted work has brought the film to perfectly fit with the Warhammer world.”
The cinematic is to give the basic situation, in which an exhausted, weakened Empire army faces Chaos Warriors after the Great War. The aim of the three-minute character-oriented film was to give a true flash of the Warhammer world, to emotionally affect the audience, and to leave open questions in the story, letting the viewer find the answers in the game or in his/her fantasy.
The ‘Warrior Priest’ is the favorite character for Istvan Zorkoczy, and turned out to be the main character of the film, and leader of the Empire army. Choosing the enemies, they needed to represent the Warhammer world as authentically as possible. There was the bloodthirsty god of Chaos, Khorne, the lone High Elf shadow warrior, and some Goblins, but they didn’t feature much in the final film.
“We actually scripted a long Goblin chase through the hazy forest,” describes Zorkoczy, “where the empire troops are tricked into an ambush by Chaos hordes. This intro sequence had to be left out because of its length. Now the film starts with a more clear and simple spot. I was very sad to leave this intro out, for it would have added a lot to the film, but one has to obey the rules of time and technology. Perhaps we can make another version one day.”
The animatic was then started with a final script for Istvan to direct from. First, a very simple version was prepared as a guide for the mocap. At the same time, the hires characters were developed and refined in parallel with the camera-move variations being trialed as well. “Contrary to most game cinematics, we deliberately chose such classic angles and camera moves as seen in live-action film production to belie the CG feel. The authenticity of these views were increased by camera shake, which was put on main moves as additional layers, and by the true-to-nature settings of motion blur and depth of field in the rendering phase." The PRman work made sure these effects appeared correctly.
The visual world of the short is of course aligned to the more than 23-year-old WarHammer universe. Peter Fendrik was Art Director on ‘Mark of Chaos’ and had worked on previous Digic projects like the Exigo films. An acclaimed 3D artist in his own right, Peter had the Digic team gather as many sources as possible. He intended to display a very realistic visual world; and only life-like main characters. Any strange, distorted figures had to be made credibly moveable in a way that they wouldn’t lose the very characteristic and dominant visual world of Warhammer. “This wasn’t easy, so we had to use little tricks sometimes,” begins Fendrik. “For example, we really liked the original Chaos Warrior armor, but anytime his arm was lifted, it ran through the warrior’s head with the quite spectacular thorns on the shoulder armor. We consulted every plan with Games Workshop, who were really good partners all along.”
“Of course in a good film atmosphere is just as important as characters and the story,” Peter continues. “The very deserted, almost primitive setting we chose was intended to express the hopelessness of the story, while not driving attention away from the characters. To create this realistic visual world, we used rather simple lighting. The burned-out forest atmosphere was created by compositing lots of fog and smoke layers. As an atmosphere of heavy fog can become a little milky, we also put in flying ashes and glowing, red-hot trunks.”
