fxguide talks to Rainmaker Entertainment’s Shea Wageman about the storytelling behind the cinematic game trailer for Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction.
The trailer, which features the game’s lead character Sam Fisher, owes its origins to a surprising moment of musical revelation. “We went to Ubisoft and they showed us some of the images from the game,” explained Shea Wageman, Rainmaker’s Director and Producer on the project. “We honed in on one image of Sam smashing a guy’s head on a piano. We felt it would be really cool if he was at a piano pondering a thought, and we went through a tour of all his thoughts up until that point and what was happening to him right then.”
Embarking on this piano motif, Rainmaker devised a script for the trailer and produced storyboards and, ultimately, a 3D previs in consultation with Ubisoft. “Our original pitch was much more artistic and less conventional, but they wanted to stick with something that was more in line with the game,” said Wageman.
Once the previs was approved, Rainmaker acquired the necessary digital assets and models of characters and locations from Ubisoft. “Because of the high quality of the trailer, we needed to up-rez them or build some of them from scratch in Maya,” recalled Wageman. To help achieve a photoreal look for the characters’ faces, Rainmaker artists studied a number of real life actors. “We used Daniel Craig, things from Superman and other hero live action movies,” said Wageman. “From there we built the facial animation iteration by iteration until it felt like it was real.”
Character animation for the trailer started in Rainmaker’s own motion capture studio, with the resulting motion files requiring only a small amount of polishing in Maya. The approach to animation was generally one of subtlety, although, as Wageman noted, that did not necessarily make the process any simpler.
“There’s an early shot of Sam turning his head at the piano as the camera pans around him. You’d think that would be an easy one but in this case we were trying to make it photoreal. We found that the less you did, the more real it made him, as opposed to over-animating him. Not only did we mocap that shot, we had to build a muscle system in CG for the face. 180-200 face shapes were created that all blended together when animated. We had to create a very special control system to control them all using certain shapes.”
“That all had to be created prior to any animation being done,” continued Wageman, “so when he moves all the muscles move in tandem. The thing about being real is that when you raise your eyebrows, say, the whole rest of your face rises up. Your nose even goes up. We had to build all that in to make it work before we could even put him into animation.”
The trailer also necessitated a number of effects shots such as explosions, breaking glass, smoke, blood hits and bullet trails. “For these shots we brought in a live action visual effects supervisor named Remo Balcells,” said Wageman. “He’s worked on Superman Returns, Day After Tomorrow, Final Fantasy – so he really knew what he was doing from a live action point of view.”
Artists at Rainmaker pushed the realism even further by adopting the studio’s feature film rendering pipeline and employing a cinematic approach to the lighting. “We couldn’t light it like a lot of our other animated productions because we wanted to make it look photoreal,” explained Wageman. “Part of that is because every lighting situation is slightly different. We had to address every shot piece by piece. We couldn’t automate everything, so a lot of it is hand-lit to make it look more cinematic. For that we brought in a live-action director of photography who worked with our crew to take the CG edge off the lighting.”
Technical accomplishments aside, Wageman is reminded that the eight month design and production process all started with a screenshot from the game. “It gave us the lynchpin and it also made it more interesting – why was Sam at the piano? That image from the game was our whole launching point.”
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