Making of:
Deadfall Adventures
Cinematic
Credits
Client
Nordic Games
Direction
Marcin Sławek
Executive Producer
Renata Kowzan
Project Supervision
Karol Zakrzewski
Concept Art
Damian Bajowski, Wojtek Szklarski
Creative Direction
Marcin Sławek
Compositing
Hubert Mazaki Dłużniewski, Łukasz Grzelak, Marcin Przymus, Paweł Krzemiński, Michał Wojtasik, Adam Rosłanowski
3D
Grzegorz Czarnota, Marek Woźniak, Marek Jasiński, Bartek Kalinowski, Jacek Wrona, Piotr Szuter, Piotr Kurzątkowski
Edit
Wojtek Włodarski
Music
Marcin Kuczewski
Sound Design
Błażej Kafarski
Postproduction Manager
Dana Młynarczyk
story
Deadfall Adventures Cinematic
The cinematic supports November 2013 premiere of Deadfall Adventures game published by Austrian publisher Nordic Games and Polish developer The Farm 51. The main thread of the game puts the player in many different and unexpected places creating a mood from well-known adventure movies like the ‘Indiana Jones’ or ‘Mummy’, that is also nicely reflected in the trailer. Marcin Sławek, one of our studio creative directors, has directed Deadfall Adventure cinematic. He is also responsible for creative direction.
Direction
Marcin Sławek
In the initial draft of the script our director, Marcin Sławek, came up with solutions focused on artistic detail; it turned out, however, that, just like advertising, game cinematics are very much subject to trends. These consist mainly in dynamic action, which directly reflects the game’s stylistics. That being so, the script has been modified to its present form.
Tech
The essential part was determining which scenes to choose and what their contents should be. The decision to mix slow motion with time-lapse allowed us to focus in an efficient way on detail. The three-month deadline forced us to cut down the amount of character animation. Choosing slow motion and time-lapse photography as the techniques for this project was a deliberate decision – this way we were able to deal with a rather complex script in such a short time. It was a great idea, although, We have to say, far from easy from the editing point of view. We would like to thank Wojtek Włodarski for his help during the editing phase. We also received a lot of conceptual support from Damian Bajowski who created exquisite mood boards and matte paintings.
The jungle was created partly based on objects generated in the studio, partly out of objects purchased in3D libraries. The floor was made entirely with PaintFx tool from Maya.
Jungle
One of the most spectacular scenes is the plane flying towards the camera. It was a huge challenge for us as well. A seemingly easy task, but once we saw the color the corrugated wings were supposed to be, we knew there’d be trouble. A claret-colored Junkers, what a nightmare :). In the first rendering tests the wings looked like roofing corrugated iron sheets.
What’s interesting is?
We were able to use TVX – our own original format for transferring data from one 3D software to another. We’ve been working on it for some time now, and the game cinematic was a perfect testing environment for TVX. Thanks to the TVX format used to transfer data between MAYA and MAX, we were able to transfer significant amounts of animated objects such as bullet splinters. The format is fast, very easy to use and it allows the interpolation of the frames – the time can be calibrated in a lossless fashion while at the same time maintaining the fluent motion. For the purposes of this project we also used some original plug-ins created by our software developing team.
Compositing process
The composition process itself was an example of an unconventional approach. Besides the standard compositing of numerous layers, we also generated objects that usually are made in the 3D department – for example, in the scene where the cable is shot through, the smoke rising from a bullet was created entirely in AE.
