00:01A grande parte del Hellblade projecto è sharing development e essere open about
00:05how we make the game, so we wanted to announce the game early on in
00:09the development process so we could share the journey with you from the
00:12very beginning.
00:18Something we always do in Ninja Theory is create a previs trailer at the very
00:23beginning of development, to define the art style, the mood and the tone of the
00:27game. As we move through development then the vision can change a lot as you'll
00:33see from these examples. These videos are never intended to be seen by the public
00:38they're just used to pitch the game to publishers but given that we are the
00:42publisher on Hellblade there's no real reason to hold them back. We used to
00:46create these in CG but these days we create them in engine. It's an
00:50opportunity for us to take concept art and try and realize it as in-game assets
00:55so we can test whether a character will hold up, we can test whether we can
01:00recreate the atmosphere and mood of the art and we can also test our ability to
01:05overcome any technical difficulties. It was also an opportunity to take the
01:09tech art experiment, the performance capture tech and the character tech that
01:13we've been prototyping to see if it held up. At the beginning of this trailer we
01:18had very limited resources. We didn't have any designers or animators and we only
01:23had one programmer and much of his time was being spent on another project. We
01:29didn't know when we were going to be staffing up the team so we had to design
01:32the trailer around the art team that we had at the time and this consisted of a
01:37concept artist, an environment artist, a character artist and an art director.
01:42I proposed an idea that was just focusing on revealing Senua as a character and
01:48hinting at some of the themes that surround her story. When everyone in the
01:54room is shouting, jumping, screaming and shooting that one way to stand out is to
02:00just stand still. The idea was quickly sketched out by Mark our senior concept
02:05artist into storyboards which Tamim then took and edited into a sequence. We needed a
02:10soundtrack for the trailer and music licensing can be incredibly complicated
02:15and it can take months to get a contract signed. Luckily in this case we had a
02:20shortcut. A few years ago I met Danny and Emily from a band called Passarella
02:24Death Squad and we had remained friends ever since. They just recently released a
02:29gorgeous track called Just Like Sleep and so I tried it out in the edit and it
02:33just felt really good, it felt right for it. Luckily they were very happy to help out.
02:38Knowing that we could use this track I created a very rough edit that was tying
02:43to the music. So in Maya we could now block out the environments and the
02:47cameras and iterate very quickly in grey box form until we had precisely locked
02:52down what we wanted to see at every shot. As we started locking down the view we
02:56would take screenshots and give it to Mark our concept artist who would over
03:00paint these into full-blown illustrations. So now that we had the camera set and we
03:04had some great illustrations from Mark we could go ahead and start dressing the
03:08scene in full 3D in-engine. Dan set about creating the in-game assets at this
03:13point in Unreal Engine. Where possible we would use real-world reference if we
03:19could. So for example I brought in a kitchen knife that was made of hand-folded
03:24metal. Melina brought in a foxgull that she found on a dog walk. Claire ordered some
03:29leather and material samples over the internet for Senua's dress and Craig
03:34brought in a potato sack. So it was around this time that Sony got in touch and
03:39asked if we wanted to announce the game at Gamescom at their press conference. The
03:44only problem was that we'd been working to one deadline and their deadline was a
03:49week earlier. But this was such a great opportunity we couldn't turn it down so we
03:54went for it. At this early stage we didn't have an actress to play Senua so Melina
03:58stepped in to take up the role. Her skin details, wrinkles and pores were captured
04:02in 3D using a device that Stu and Craig had developed in-house. In Heavenly Sword
04:07I believe that we were the first game to actually use performance capture but it
04:12can take months to prepare for a shoot. The shoot itself takes weeks, it can cost
04:17hundreds of thousands of dollars and it can be months before you get the data
04:20back. Now in Hellblade we do want to push this tech forward again but for the
04:25teaser in particular we wanted to do it on a budget of a tiny budget of a few
04:29hundred pounds and in a matter of weeks. Stu and Craig worked together on a
04:34potential solution but this was a very high-risk strategy. We didn't know if we
04:38could if we could solve the problems and get usable data in the time we had for
04:44this teaser. So we shot all of the scenes using Melina, our video editor, as a
04:49placeholder actress and we cut the video edits into the into the trailer and gave
04:54the time codes to Craig to see if he could extract the 3D data. But in this
04:59case time was too tight and it didn't pay off but it's a project we want to
05:02return to in the future. Instead we had GTAC, a new animator, come on board and he
05:08would rotoscope all of the scenes based on the video reference. The final step was
05:12grading so Mark and Alex Tahini, our company art director, overpainted a few of the
05:17frames to try and get the ideal lighting and color schemes for for the trailer.
05:24These would then have to be replicated for the final trailer both in engine by
05:28setting up lights in 3D space and in post.
05:38We did make mistakes and we put in a lot of hours to get the trailer done but to go
05:43from an idea to something we're incredibly proud of in eight weeks and show it at the
05:49Sony press conference at Gamescom, it was fantastic.
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