Creating game cinematics

How stories, concepts and trailers for games are turned into pure, digital sex. Uh, game videos. We mean game videos.

Storylines and narrative are commonplace in modern games; epic tales accompany on-screen action to explain why we’re planting C4 on walls, mowing people down with Flak-Cannons or hunting for the crystal/child of prophecy that’ll save the world. Again.

Before PC and console platforms had the power to flex multimedia muscle, static bitmaps strung together from a limited palette and complimented by text dialog were the best devices around for getting the story across to the player. It seemed enough at the time to draw us into 16-bit greats like Shadow of the Beast, and the 90s stint of FMV (Full Motion Video) footage in games (starring actors best left to bootleg porn films) was quaint for a while, but in a world where Shader Model 3.0 can spit out luxury real-time 3D, cinematics have had to evolve to stay fresh.

Now games are preceded by incredible trailers. Cut-scenes between levels are emotive moving works of art, shaping our understanding of the in-game world. For this level of visual splendor, the tool of choice is often offline 3D rendering, allowing unlimited creativity. Game developers like Auran don’t have the in-house capabilities to produce the kind of heavy duty 3D found in most game cinematics; instead outsourcing the work to a dedicated studio like Act3 animation in Melbourne to produce the trailer for its fantasy based Player-Versus-Player MMO, Fury.

“The trailer was something we don’t have the rendering power to do time-effectively in-house,” explained Bjorn Bednarek (associate producer, Auran).

“It made more sense for our team to work closely with Act3 producing a trailer that reflected the artistic direction of our team, using the talent and hardware of a specialist company.”

To get the meat of how in-game movies are made we decided harassment of everyone from Act3 to NVIDIA was the best course of action.