What particular distinctive challenges did you face and how did you address them?

The primarily challenge was combining a fast paced racing cinematic with all the destruction & FX - we’d worked on both in isolation but never together on this scale. The FX scenes needed both low & high poly versions so we could work the simulations as efficiently as possible.

Does this work differ at all from your previous work? Were there any technical techniques that you tried out in this piece?

Most individual aspects were already part of our game cinematic pipeline, but we did use a few new techniques which were of benefit and have continued using since. For the pre-viz we created a hybrid 3D/2D animatic which combined 3D racing action with camera mapped 2D concepts for the city & buildings. It worked really well both in terms of communicating to the client our vision for the movie and internally directing the modelling team. At times it can be difficult to make the connection how a 2D concept piece will work in 3D space, particularly when racing down streets, so this basically answered a lot of questions earlier than normal. Following on from Stormbirds, we pushed the use of camera mapping further on this project, utilising for city scenes. The movie was started early 2008 and was the first time we’d used linear workflow on a game cinematic, which allowed us to emulate real lighting conditions more accurately. We also used physical cameras throughout for their true life motion blur and depth of field.

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