Hand painted or hand built

We wanted to introduce WARSAW with a trailer. Just like only a couple hundred thousand games before did. And we knew from the start the trailer will be almost devoid of gameplay, but rather set the mood for what was about to come afterwards. The effect we were hoping for was that of the first Dead Island’s reverse chronology piece or Halo 3’s Believe diorama wonder. Grim, lacking hope and definitely missing the happy ending.

The mood was easy to nail, but the technique to get there wasn’t. Full blown CGI affair wasn’t an option, as it did not fit with the stylized visuals of WARSAW the game, so we looked into two different approaches. Either a hand drawn cinematic or a figurine/diorama based one.

The first had obvious advantage of being more in line with the visual style in the game, and the second allowed us to use dioramas to nail that tangible urban setting.

Both of these choices had their disadvantages though. Both would be time consuming. The first would also require a studio with experience in style that isn’t really very popular for commercial projects in Poland. The second – was even less predictable and still required a painstakingly long process before we would know if it would even work.

For a better part of two months we were exploring both the options, when in July’18 a trailer for Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics dropped. And that was it for the figurine/diorama based approach.

With the initial work put in the months before in September’18 we reached out to four animation studios. The email was short. “Need a video for an unannounced game. 45 secs, hand painted animation, evoking images of European comics mixed with GITS Innocence stylized visuals. Come back with a budget and a timeline”.

One studio came back very swiftly mentioning that hand painted animation isn’t their thing. Two others came back with request for further details. One is yet to respond.

For the two studios that wanted to get in on the details we created a short and dramatic script that for the reasons of total secrecy on our part (the game wasn’t yet announced) was named Uncivil War (a codename that almost became the actual name as per yesterday's story) and set in near future.

Of the two companies left one came back with the budget and timeline. And the other invited us and treated to an animated feature consisting of storyboards + music combo that sold us immediately.

That’s how we got to work with Human Ark Studio on WARSAW’s announcement trailer. Which took three very long months to complete. But that’s a story for tomorrow.