One of our Maverick tenets is that we make games communications that are authentic to the game experience – we believe that the game itself should be the primary inspiration and vehicle for the messaging we want to convey. As a result we have worked with a lot of different game engines to create various types of marketing and in-game content and are very interested in the development of Machinima - using a game engine to create narrative, cinematic and marketing content.
In our experience, game engines are pretty good at relaying action, but for this project we needed the visuals to convey atmosphere and emotive content as well; a challenge even in live action. To attempt this in-engine, and taking into account the fact that Crysis 2, and CryEngine3 was still very much in development made the project an ambitious undertaking for all involved.
From January we worked closely with Crytek importing early sets, models, AI, lighting and effects from the game and building up the trailer level where we shot our sequences. The results we achieved in CryEngine 3 were astounding – with the exception of the photos on the wall, the results you see are entirely produced in-engine and without even the need for colour grading. All rendering was achieved more or less in real time too.
Of course there was a high level of scrutiny from gamers who knew the previous Crysis was as high a benchmark as existed for graphical quality and processing, and they wanted to see how this would look when played out of a console. What you see is authentic to what the gamer will experience in the game itself - in fact the trailer could exist as a location within the game with all the animations rendering in real time (now there's an idea for unlockable content).
Such a complex process can never be perfect on a tight schedule and with incomplete game assets, but we were seriously impressed with what could be done – and equally inspired about the value of such undertakings for this and future projects; we all know that game engines can make pretty pictures (although none as pretty as Crytek’s ;)), but the increasing subtleties being built in to CryEngine3 – from real-time colour grading to the cinematic way it handles light and cameras, give it serious potential as a story-telling device. As one of the pioneers to professionally produce video using this method, this makes Maverick very excited for the future, and very proud of our achievement.
To us, it is fairly clear that one day we'll see a feature-film made from a game-engine; could that engine be CryEngine3?
(...Concluded in Part 4...)
(...Concluded in Part 4...)
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