War Is Here, Or Is It? With Axis ‘Killzone’ CGI Intro
In the Axis Animation cinematic introduction to the new Playstation2 video game ‘Killzone’, Helghan leader Scolar Visari is not a happy camper.
Released in Europe on Nov. 26 and published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Dutch developer Guerrilla Games, ‘Killzone’ features all the usual dressing for a Class-A apocalyptic scenario, including persecution, exodus, invasion and a bloody and brutal war. When Axis created the introduction to give gamers the much-appreciated back-story, Scolar Visari was invented based on a ‘blend’ of three other characters. A classic Darth Vader type, he rallies his troops to battle, ranting, raving, and all but foaming at the mouth. It’s quite a show, and quite a bit of top-quality CGI animation from Axis.
Axis Head of Production Sam McCarthy was willing to give credit for the script (or blame?) to Guerrilla Games’ Martin Capel. Not wanting for raw emotion and the zeal of his fictitious cause, Capel’s fantasy character Visari is a real monster, appealing to his troops of apparently mutant soldiers with all the gusto of an Armageddon anti-Christ, calling his troops, “The strength in my arm, the holders of my dream.”
McCarthy says Capel’s coined phrase often came up among the artists and crew who worked on the intro for about five months. “We’d go around saying that,” she said. “The strength in my arm.”
Actor Brian Cox (who has starred in films like ‘Troy’, ‘The Bourne Supremacy’, and ‘X-Men 2’) was recruited to voice the nefarious Visari character. “By all accounts he was absolutely fantastic,” said McCarthy. Motion-capture techniques were employed at Audiomotion Studios in Oxford, who recorded Cox’s physical performance, whilst audio studio Side simultaneously recorded his voice.
“Working with such a high calibre actor as Brian Cox brought a whole new dimension to the sequence,” said McKenna in a press statement. “The decision to capture the body motion on the same day as the voice record proved to be an excellent one. Many nuances driven from the speech came across well once translated into CGI and Brian’s years of experience showed, resulting in a chilling performance.”
Axis Animation is located in Glasgow and does work for commercials, broadcast, video games and more. The group was founded in 2000 and has completed projects for Disney Channel, BBC, Passion Pictures, Aardman Animation, Sony, and Granada Sky Broadcasting. The company has 12 employees, and works with as many as 13 freelancers. CGI modelling, broadcast graphics, animation and other work earned the company Gold and Silver ProMax Awards recently. Past high-profile projects have included three promotional spots for Disney’s well-known ‘Toy Story-2’, commercials for Duracell, work for the Tomb Raider game and more.
McCarthy, who is 31 years old, has worked for Axis for three years and has ten years of media and animation experience. She said Axis has almost doubled in size over the past year. For a project like the ‘Killzone’ intro, McCarthy undertook to create what is effectively a very short, but highly cinematic, CGI film.
“Game cinematics is what we like to call it,” she said in the Skwigly interview on Dec. 1. “They are little movies in their own right. It’s very much about bringing the correct team together.”
As producer, preparing and carrying out the project required “a lot of planning,” said McCarthy. Artists with specific skills were needed, negotiations with the client had to be right, and the artists or ‘team’ needed encouragement, direction and tools. The intro and other animated video-bites can be downloaded or viewed at www.warishere.com.
Much of the sequence was pre-conceived by Guerrilla Games, and people like concept artist Roy Postma and lead artist Jan-Bart van Beek. The director was Graham McKenna at Axis.
The emotive and compelling musical score for both the intro and the entire game was composed and orchestrated by Joris De Man, and performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra.
Work such as this in game cinematics is also great for Axis in terms of the learning curve for other types of animation they may be hired for, she added. “There is a little bit of cross-over,” said McCarthy. “Character design and build, animation and lighting.”
The company’s current short-form animated series for BBC called ‘Colin and Cumberland’, uses some of the same techniques. “It’s still CG,” said McCarthy. “But it’s very much cartoonier and the backgrounds are very illustrative.” The series of five-minute shorts features a man and his talking dog.
As far as the ‘Killzone’ intro, McCarthy said in press statements that the company is quite proud of the work. “I think it’s fair to say that we have all been quite touched by the intro in one way or another,” she commented. “We rose to the challenge that Guerrilla presented and delivered a piece that we are justly proud to have worked on.”
“Game cinematics are challenging both television and feature films for the quality of their animation,” adds McKenna. “We want to continue to be a big part of the ever-changing collision between video games and more traditional forms of entertainment.”
Axis Animation studio on-line at www.axisanimation.com