Final Team Story Board

Below is the final version of our team storyboard showing what is going to happen in the entire trailer:


From this plan we will know what order to put our clpis together in and what needs to be made.
Everyone in our team has agreed to this plan as we discussed this in a team meeting on Wednesday and went through all the details and everyone should know what they need to do for their section of the trailer.

3D Work Update

I thought I would give a quick update on how my 3D work is progressing - or should I say how it isn't. Over the last couple of weeks I have been having increasingly annoying technical difficulties when trying to put all the pieces together. This is mainly in tihe form that "flipping the normals" keeps breaking - I select the entire box to flip them but when I click "Flip Normals" only a small portion of them flip even though I selected all of the faces. When I try to fix the normals it keeps repeating the same problems it just flips random normals even though I select specific faces. This is making it impossible to continue on that particular save and so I've had to restart several times now with several hours worth of work time wasted.
Physically my section is probably the easiest to make out of all of them, its just flipping the normals and sticking all the pieces together that is creating all of my problems.

Hopefully in this afternoons 3D class I will be able to progress further than I have manged to get so far.

Texture Slideshow

The above slideshow showcases a series of photographs I took to use as potential textures. Also in the slideshow there are a couple of photos of buildings/shots I thought would make good inspiration. For example, the image of the church behind the trees. I took thath picture as it gave me inspiration similar to how I felt when you see Rapture for the first time in Bioshock when the camera moves over the hill. I get the same sense when I see part of the church in the distance mostly obscured by the trees.

As for the bulk of the shots, I took those picures as I thought I might be able to use them somewhere within my trailer. So I was mainly on the lookout for metal grids and grates that I could use as us flooring and greys and dark browns to be used as the walls.
I was speciically looking for darker colours as it would fit in more with the feel I want to achieve with my section of the trailer - dark, creepy, horror themed. As my section willl be of ruined corridors, my main focus is on the lighting as I feel it is the most crutial part of it. As the lights will be dark, brightly coloured textures would look out of place so I am trying to keep a common theme throughout.

Fox's Biscuits

The second advert he told us about the Fox's Biscuits with Vinnie the panda bear.
Even though the trailer is ten seconds long and can be watched by clicking HERE, the trailer cost considerably more. This ten second trailer cost over £1 million to make due to there being several problems and indecisiveness by Fox's biscuits over what it is they actually wanted. So it cost over £1m to make - way over the original budget and had over 120 staff working on it.
Some of the jobs the staff were doign was - photography, 3D modelling, lighting, catering, legal, poeple renting rooms and props, voice over artists
All of those costs built up and with Fox's Biscuits being indescisive about what they wanted, Double negative soon found themselves over budget and quickly running out of time before they finally managed to get a completed advert that the company liked.
Thankfully the advert was so popular, that 4 more were produced.

Double Negative - Channel 4 Dubai Advert

As stated in the previous post, Lewis showed us 2 adverts that he had worked on and we talked about things such as its cost, how many people worked on it and what they did etc.

Click to see the Dubai/construction advert HERE

The brief for the advert was to show Channels 4 logo/number within the buildings that were under construction. In the advert there would have been about 40 people working on it all doing different things such as the helicopter pilot, 3D modellers, animation, photoshop artists.
Producing the advert took a couple of months for the filming of the ariel shots and hten for t he actual editing and adding the 3D buildings, shadows etc About 50% of hte buildings and cranes in the advert are 3D models.
The overall cost for the advert came to about £250,000. A quarter of a million for a 40 second advert.

Double Negative

On monday we had an industry event where Lewis Guarniere from Double Negative came in and gave us a talk about what he does. He's a 3D modeller and on his current project he is responsible for adding veins and details to muscles on characters, but has doen 3D work for a variety of other projects.
Some of the projects that Double Negative ahve worked on are:
The Dark Knight
several of the Harry Potter films
Cloverfield
Inception
These are some of the great films where Double Negative have provided digital graphics and post production details.

Lewis went on to talk about his position in the company and what his job involves and how he got to where he was from school, going through university to getting his first job in the industry as a "Runner" someone who runs about getting drinks for the staff and other similar jobs.
He also told us how much he was earning which was about £35k. His talk about his history and the work the company has done took about 2 hours. After lunch, when we all met up again, he gave us some example trailers/commercials the company had produced and asked us to write down things like -
how much did we think the commercial cost/budgeting?
How many staff were involved and what were their jobs?
What implications could there be - such as legal or health and safety issues.

He was impressed that we were taking so many different things in to account such job roles of staff, implications such as insurance, catering etc.

My Quote
"I found the presentation overall to be very interesting and gave lots of information. Even though it was more iamed at the movie/TV industry than the games, alot of it could be applied to the games industry. I learnt alot abou what goes in to the production and post production process as well as the huge amount of money that goes in to creating a TV trailer. A brilliant presentation and I would recommend talks like this being done again."

Responses To Company Contacts

Or lack thereof...
A couple of weeks ago our team got together to send an email out to a few games companies to ask for information on how they make game trailers and how the industry works in general.
Below is a screenshot of the email I sent to the companies:

The letter was written with a degree of professionalism and told the reader who we were, asked our questions politely and also invited them to come and attend our digital showcase in May.
This emial was sent to 3 games companies -
- Lionhead Studios
- Bungie
- Naughty Dog

We chose those companies in specific because at least one of us were fans of games created by those companies and we all knew something about them. It also helped that I ws supposed to have done work experience with Lionhead a couple of years ago, however that fell through when they stopped it to start testing Fable 2. This meant my previous contact with Lionhead shoiuld have helped in writting to them and general contact with them.

About 2 weeks have passed since we sent the email and sadly none of hte companies have got back to us which is a shame. The only reply we got to our email was an automatic reply from Bungie thanking us for sending in a "bug report", which of course we didn't do. So we are a little dissapointed at the lack of response. However, while our team didn't get any replies, the other teams did. Some of the responses they got didn't have much information, one emial that Steve, of Intelecual Arcade, got back was full of information that answered most if not all the questions that all of the teams asked. Below is the response that they got, which Steve, kindly emiled on to us as we haven't got any replies.



The emil talks about the different roles/people involved in making a trailer, team sizes, the timeframe forcreating a trailer as well as mentioning a bit of the budgeting for them though he doesn't mention any prices as the costs can vary so much.