00:02That great IP, together with that great game, was just such an exciting opportunity.
00:08There is a lot of really dense, dense detail in this trailer. It bears up to repeated watching.
00:19So we've worked on lots of games at Maverick over our 20 years, but there was something really attractive about
00:24this proposition.
00:25We knew that the Games Workshop world, that world of high fantasy with Warhammer, was something that would transfer really,
00:33really well into Total War, kind of instantly.
00:35Anyone who sees that can see that it's just this match made in heaven.
00:44In the trailer, we join a light wizard who's undergoing a feverish search for answers to the ongoing war that
00:53seems to have plagued the world.
00:54And as he's searching, we're able to kind of dip into his visions as the book that he's looking and
01:01searching through starts to corrupt him, starts to play on his mind and offer him up, assail him with all
01:08these visions of the world at war.
01:11We're our own worst critics about the kind of detail that we put into our games and the assets that
01:15we create to promote them.
01:17And so we really wanted to get every single little detail right.
01:21For example, the light wizard and the light college he inhabits, the amount of detail that went into the actual
01:27design of that location,
01:29from the different architectural styles of the actual building itself, different levels of dilapidation,
01:35but also what would be on the table, for example, they use refracted light, so there would be certain sort
01:39of implements.
01:41Even the symbols and the symbology on the robes and the things they carry, down to the smallest detail, you
01:47had to get this right.
01:49So the trailer has two distinct types of style within it.
01:53It has a photoreal style for sequences with the wizard, and then you have a more abstract painterly style for
01:58the world sequences.
02:01Warhammer world is quite heavily stylized. Everything is slightly oversized.
02:08And because this is the world of the book, this is the world inside of the story,
02:13we decided to make it a little more painterly, a little less real.
02:18So we chose to a photoreal style for the trailer, for the wizard particularly,
02:23because we wanted people to relate to him as a character.
02:26I think the biggest challenge of the project was to really capture the reality of the character.
02:33And we have amazing tools right now.
02:36We've got great mock-ups, we've got great performance capture, and a lot of other techniques.
02:42But it really doesn't capture everything.
02:45So our answer was actually to shoot everything with the same actor who was the base for the scan for
02:50the light wizard.
02:51And we actually played the whole thing, trying to get the same angles and the same editing as in the
03:00final film.
03:02We used it as a reference for the animators so they can see all these little shakes of the hands,
03:07all these little shakes of the face, which normally are filtered out during the process of normal performance capture.
03:17We had some great help from the Total War team, because they're obviously working on the game.
03:23So a lot of them, modelling and stuff, interpretations, the characters have already begun.
03:28It was actually a pleasure to work with such amazing assets.
03:33We didn't have to design any things, we just had to use the existing high-resolution assets from the game,
03:40and just add a layer of reality over it.
03:48When it came to audio for the trailer, we're really lucky to have a BAFTA award-winning department here at
03:53Creative Assembly.
03:56It was definitely a challenge to work with the kind of creatures and the world that we had,
04:00because they've been seen a lot, but not many times have they been heard.
04:04So all of the sound design was done bespoke.
04:10We use the, like, our own voices, actors' voices.
04:15Audio has a real key part to bringing the creatures to life,
04:19because it just adds that kind of sense of reality.
04:26One of the big challenges for the trailer was in depicting chaos accurately.
04:29It's not something that's been seen a lot moving over the last 25 years,
04:34so it's really interesting and uniquely challenging to get that on the screen.
04:39Chaos is a dark force that kind of pervades and is constantly trying to break through into the world
04:43and take over elements of it and change them.
04:46It's never really something that you can define, so you have to kind of create a sense of chaos,
04:52and then it's in the change it makes on the people that this kind of force is visualized in.
04:57So it was a complicated idea just to nail down the concept of what it is
05:02before you even thought technically about how you're actually going to visualize this in a realistic CG form.
05:08There's lots of different elements that you have to balance,
05:10and we have to go back and forth to kind of create and refine and add elements
05:14to kind of create this kind of really unpleasant sense of something taking you over,
05:19which is organic, driven and menacing.
05:22One of the nice touches that I don't think a huge number of people have picked up on
05:26is that when the wizard's reading the book throughout the trailer,
05:30you can see little tendrils of chaos kind of chasing his fingertips in some of the scenes,
05:34and it was important to kind of drop those little details in
05:37and sort of build up that kind of menace and that idea of this book coming alive.
05:43There's lots of highlights when you work across a project such as this.
05:47I think the bit that sums up most is probably just the moment
05:50where the camera moves wide to show the green-skinned hordes
05:53moving towards the human forces with wyverns and giants and fireballs,
05:58and for me it just sums up the promise of both Warhammer and Total War together.
06:05That is the promise of the game right there.
06:07I think my most favorite still would be a zombie dragon, because it's a zombie dragon, right?
06:17Our satisfaction with the amazing trailer we've ended up with is just seeing people online
06:22saying great things about it, and I think that's probably the absolute best result we could have
06:27hoped for. It makes the whole process, the two-year process, really worthwhile.
06:32There's no more fun to be had than making people excited.
06:37I hope so.
06:38What that does happen to be the one?
06:39So, wait.
06:40Bye.
06:40Bye.
06:41Bye.
06:41Bye.
06:41Bye.
06:41Bye.
06:41Bye.
