Digital Domain and directors Neil Huxley and Vernon Wilbert of sister shop Mothership teamed with Square Enix and Airtight Games to create this :90 trailer to launch the game Murdered: Soul Suspect, which is slated for release later this year. The trailer was unveiled during E3, piquing viewers’ imaginations with a brief origin story of the game’s protagonist, Ronan, and building to a climactic reveal, designed to drive viewers to a website to learn more.
Square Enix exec producer Naoto Sugiyama said of the decision to go with Digital Domain, “We needed a team that could pull off production quality of the highest degree, tell our story in CG in a way that felt emotive and powerful–more like a film than a game, and do it all within a games marketing schedule and budget.”
To realize the stylized, movie-like piece, Huxley and co-director Vernon Wilbert used the tools and techniques of filmmaking. They began by developing a story for Ronan, which then defined the structure and limitations of his environments. For the shoot, they segmented the script and shot it in sections, like a typical feature film, instead of shot-by-shot, the more common approach for games marketing.
“By working this way we were able to help the actor stay in the moment during the shoot and capture several different camera angles, which helped us avoid re-shoots,” said Huxley.
“Digital Domain has worked with some of the biggest directors of the past 20 years and brings that film knowledge to every project,” said Wilbert. “We took things like lens flares created for the game environment and re-created them so they could work in a real world. We adapted some of the visual rules of films that inspired us, and brought their style of lighting, cameras, shooting – even the contrast ratio from color grading – into this piece because they were great metaphors for this story.”
Huxley and Wilbert also leveraged Digital Domain’s virtual production studio and team, conducting a live action stage shoot to capture the mood, tone, lighting and body/face/voice performance that drove the digital characters and assets. They tapped the studio’s advanced facial capture and animation process and pipeline used on the Academy-Award-winning movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, on TRON: Legacy, Jack the Giant Slayer and many other top features and commercials.
The Hottest Ticket At Sundance: Writer-Director Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Rose Byrne plays a mother in the midst of a breakdown in the experiential psychological thriller "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You."
Anticipation was high for the A24 film, which will be released sometime this year. Its premiere Friday at the Sundance Film Festival was easily the hottest ticket in town, with even ticketholders unable to get in. Those who did make it into the Library theater were treated to an intense, visceral, inventive story from filmmaker Mary Bronstein that has quickly become one of the festival's must-sees.
Byrne plays Linda, who is barely hanging on while managing her daughter's mysterious illness. She's faced with crisis after crisis, big and small โ from the massive, gaping hole in their apartment ceiling that forces them to move to a dingy motel, to an escalating showdown with a parking attendant at a care center. The cracks in her psychological, emotional and physical wellbeing are become too much to bear.
"I'd never seen a movie before where a mother is going through a crisis with a child but our energy is not with the child's struggle, it's with the mother's," Bronstein said at the premiere. "If you're a caretaker, you shouldn't be bothering with yourself at all. It should all be about the person you're taking care of, right? And that is a particular kind of emotional burnout state that I was really interested in exploring."
Byrne and Bronstein went deep in the preparation phase, having long discussions about Linda with the goal of making her as real as possible before the quick, 27-day shoot. Byrne said she was obsessed with figuring out who Linda was before the crisis. The film was in part inspired by Bronstein's experience with her own daughter, but she didn't want to elaborate on the... Read More