 |
|
de Blob: United Wii stand
[Wed 30/07/2008 12:09:45]
In a Nintendo world where colour is a crime and blobs fight to rescue a monochromatic world, the real life challenge lay in animating an amorphous superhero, as Zona Marie Tan discovers.
 Next to hair and water, three-dimensional organic shapes are among the most difficult elements to create for most animators. Hence it was definitely no mean feat for The People’s Republic of Animation (PRA) to animate game cinematics for de Blob.
De Blob is an action puzzle game made exclusively for the Nintendo Wii platform that has been in development for over two years by Australian video game producer Blue Tongue Entertainment. Falling tight on their deadline, when Blue Tongue’s Nick Hagger met PRA’s Sam White at a game conference late 2007, they decided to collaborate on producing a one and a half minute attract loop and the end game cinematics for de Blob.
“We sat down with Sam, Brodie [McCrossin] and Ari [Gibson, both directors on the project] to talk about what our needs were. All our resources in our studio were committed, but we wanted to build both a marketing tool and what is known as the attract loop in the video game,” explains de Blob’s lead producer Hagger. “We needed something that was visually exciting and that hinted at the game’s rich narrative.”
It took PRA between six to eight weeks to complete the attract loop, which is a movie that plays when a video game is sitting in a store kiosk while it idles between the start screen and the game. But it was given as a verbal brief from Blue Tongue along with a few key sketches of the game characters. PRA was then given the task of creating a storyboard engaging enough to draw potential gamers.
“We were given a few key ideas, where a lot of it was taken from iconic film moments like Star Wars-esque space ship shots or Independence Day type street shots,” explains White. “Basically, invasion was the big word because that’s what happens at the start of the attract loop, where a beautiful radiant city is invaded by the Inkys.”
Yet, storyboarding was only a small hurdle for PRA whose uphill task was to explain the concept of the game play in that 90-second duration and to animate the lead title character, de Blob.
“They asked us to storyboard it. It was great because it was what we were good at - that’s to tell a story and to storyboard it from scratch. It’s always a challenge to introduce a new character in a short time especially a bizarre character at that. He’s just a blob of paint!” exclaims White.
Bizarre because de Blob is the unlikely hero who has to splatter, spray and splash himself in a colour revolution against the evil I.N.K.T. Corporation army of speedy I.N.K.T. racers, battle tank battalions and elite Inky soldiers.
It was those precise game movements that were the biggest challenge to the animators at both PRA and Blue Tongue.
“It was a bit tricky,” says White. “De Blob was changing all the time – always moving and changing form.”
Of course, Hagger thinks that de Blob’s unique fluid characteristics gives them a game advantage.
“De Blob is a different style of video game character. A lot of its art style is driven by designer vinyl toys,” explains Hagger. “He’s amorphous but still has very definable characteristics. So there was a real technical animation challenge in making the Blob work as a character. But our animators and their animators worked very closely to bring de Blob to life.”
For PRA, who has been doing in-game cinematics in the last two years, the other challenge working on de Blob came in reconciling the Wii images given to them to work on. Unlike the next-gen consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii outputs in 480p.
“The polygon count for the characters in-game that we received are much lower because the Wii engine can’t handle too many polygons,” explains White. “So the characters they sent us looked a bit chiselled. They needed to be up-resed and smoothened out in order to make the attract loop look like a feature film.”
Accordingly, equipped with Maya 3D, PRA worked on adding more polygons in the character’s mesh. After Effects was used later for compositing, then Final Cut for the grading and final edit. PRA produced the attract loop in HD 1920x1080 because the end delivery product would not only appear in the game but also as theatrical and online trailers.
De Blob was originally created for Windows PC as a city council project by eight Dutch game design and development students in Utrecht, Netherlands. Game publisher THQ, who owns Blue Tongue, noticed the game and acquired the game rights. De Blob is set for international release September 22.
View the trailer here.
This article appeared in IF #112 Aug 2008
1,473
|
