DREADNOUGHT | E3 TEASER
Mission:
I had just left Harvest in 2014 and switched freelancing again, when my old friend Rudolf Klumpp, producer at YAGER Interactive, gave me a call from Berlin.
Their “affair of the heart project” called DREADNOUGHT just went to pre-alpha phase and it was time for a first official glimpse on the world´s biggest game conventions, including E3 and GC.
This time, I teamed up with Kay Tennemann officially, and together we visited YAGER soon.
It turned out, the task was to create a CGI game teaser, which is like a trailer, but much shorter and non-unveiling.
I developed the concept and wrote some interpretations with the Yager game designer duo Peter Holzapfel and Mathias Wiese. Kay and I started to collect a lot of mood and reference footage to the same time and parallel, we filtered the production possibilities. Our first thought was to handle the project by ourselves, but regarding the scope and time frame, it was one of the best ideas of the decade to call Manuel Casasola Merkle from AIXSPONZA to call them in for their support.
AIXSPONZA
came up with an overwhelming amount of professional pipeline oriented planning and organization. And as soon as the concept was approved, Kay moved to Munich to support the AIXSPONZA team as 3D lead and director.
We managed to communicate between Berlin, Hamburg and Munich super fluently, and while the crazy 3D engine-room in Munich started to power up with animatics and bad-ass 3D, I prepared the compositing pipeline, kept working on the concept and started those things we could do without 3D renderings in Hamburg, like the look development, the intro sequence, Dreadnought 4K logo animation, additional motion design elements. I did this hand in hand with Peter Balicki, my motion design and compositing freelance colleague.
From concept approval to final delivery we only had four weeks to go.
That time frame was nearly impossible to manage. Because of that, Kay, Manuel and I made a lot of straight decisions. One of these decisions was to push the 3D as far as possible, and so we started the final compositing phase just six days before deadline.
The AIXSPONZA team was awesome. They put the huge project into their high quality CGI pipeline and delivered an incredible piece of work.
As always, everything was created in Maxon CINEMA 4D. This time rendered in v-ray and composed in After Effects. On the 3D side, everything from the Cinema 4D toolbox was used excessively, including v-ray, x-particles, Krakatoa, and Turbulence FD.
AIXSPONZA did some really nice roadshow and demos on Uebertage and Siggraph on their work.
And Kay and I did some as well on Maxon roadshows.
I still want to thank Yager for the opportunity. It was a great flight.
I loved that time. It was a good day. Each of them.
AixSponza GmbH
Direction: Filip Lange & Kay Tennemann
VFX Supervisor/TD: Manuel Casasola Merkle
Producer: Julian Fischer
Modeling: Marcel Dolschon, Lars Korb, Jörg Vogel, Patrick Hecht
Texturing/Shading: Lars Korb, Raphael Rau
Environment: Manuel Casasola Merkle, Fabian Hoffmann
Scene Setup & Lighting: Marcel Dolschon, Philipp Strasser, Jörg Vogel, Patrick Hecht, Kay Tennemann
VFX: Fuat Yueksel, Simon Fiedler
Compositing: Peter Baliki, Filip Lange
Additional UI Design: Julian Fleck
Yager Game Direction: Peter Holzapfel, Mathias Wiese
Yager Production: Rudolf D. Klumpp, Mark Liebold
Yager Sound Design: Alexander Marian, Julien Herion
©Greybox, Six Foot & YAGER 2014
