Shatterline

It all started with an amazing screenplay that we received from our partners FragLab. They asked us to help launch their new game “Shatterline” with its interesting world and complex set of characters. We had to create a trailer that would allow the viewer to feel thrilled while outlining an intriguing plot. “Now we are going to get super creative during the production”.

Character elaboration

First, our task was to elaborate the characters: their affect, bodies, clothing and accessories. Alan, the main character of the trailer, has a very strong personality, he gave us plenty of room for his development. We had a lot of ideas about his beard and hair, but he ended up wearing a hood because it made him look more powerful. He could be like this… or like this… but he ended up being like this!

We had a lot of fun creating Alan’s clothing and the military symbols on it, because it contains a lot of hints on the events of the game and has to reflect the essence of his cult.

Shooting

And who was going to perform? According to the approved designs, we started to look for mocap actors to film the faces. This is how the process of photogrammetry looked like.

As for the battle scene, we needed five stuntmen actors, two days of rehearsals and only eight hours of shootings. “We had to make a lot of additional shots to be sure everything would look good when rendered. They had a long exhausting day of running around!” A.Liustiber

Production

Working with people wasn't easy, but the objects requested a lot of attention too. For the space scene we had to carefully calibrate the proportions of every rock: the composition had to be beyond perfect! Also, for the scene with the crystalline rocks hitting the ground, we came up with an idea of a convergent perspective showing the gigantic scale of the catastrophe in one shot: a great solution to save the client’s resources.

For the same purpose we used another small trick. We created the city scenery with ready-made buildings and then our designers meticulously destroyed them. They even considered the traffic lights going off after the catastrophe and the wind direction.

Wow! How detailed can these images be?!

Check out something else that our CG supervisor came up with...a unique way of spreading crystalline dust (maybe we should patent it). As the shapes of the assets changed their form during rendering, he invented an ingenious way of applying it with a source of light.

Here is one last amazing fact about the Shatterline trailer:
the images of different famous locations destroyed after the catastrophe day were designed by one person.

Here’s the final product, enjoy!