Director Morten Vinther at The Mill in LA teams with the company’s Shanghai crew to nudge the boundaries of realism and atmospherics in this full-CG trailer for the Tencent/Morefun Studios FPS game Arena Breakout.

Morten Vinther: “The concept was fairly simple: follow a gun through a tactical battlefield where it changes hands from opponent to opponent. I wanted to make something that felt dark, gritty, and dangerous.

“An obvious challenge was to make sure that the audience understood it was the same rifle through the entire film. I used a SnorriCam camera technique coupled with an audio pneumonic every time this shift happens to underscore the moment.

“Gamers are so savvy when it comes to tactical warfare and weapon handling so I wanted to make sure everything felt realistic. On the mocap shoot, I employed a veteran Navy Seal weapons specialist to make sure everything was authentic from weapon handling to tactics.

“Facial performance was captured with my friends at Di4D, which gave us realistic expressions. This project was a cooperation between our LA and Shanghai studios with me based in LA leading the creative and all rendering handled by our Shanghai artists.”
 

 
Client: Tencent
Executive Producer: Sun Yiming, Dou Hongbin
Producer: Zhang Haolin, Lei Mengling
Creative Director: Long Zehui
Art Director: Li Zicong

Production: The Mill/MPC
Director: Morten Vinther
Executive Producer: Chingwen Huang
Senior Producer: Mark Driscoll
Producer: Xiao Liu, Dipesh Mahesh Gajjarr

Editorial: The Mill
Editor: Joe Mackedanz

VFX: The Mill/MPC
VFX Supervisor: Christian Kalata
Character & Environment Lead: Aram Hazke
Head of Character Development: Pascual Rubio Cervera
CG Supervisor: Jacob T Oommen
Lighting & Comp Lead: Yao Zhang
Animation Lead: Alexey Petryaev
Animation Supervisor: Mahesh M S
Grooming Artist: Anton Zheltyakov
Concept Artist: David Kang, Tim Sturdy
Asset Lead: Ullas Thunga k
Asset Team: Cathy Xi, Iris Jiao, Fiona Shi, Harshitha V V, Jayadeep Chandran, Jyoti Prakash Panda, Palash Ramnaresh Soni, S Shashi Kumar, Selva Kumar K, Shashanka Sekhar Beshra, Sumitha D, Sunku Ayusha, Vignesh Sivakumar
Animation Team: Voach Wang, Cherish Zhou, Bismark Pei, Ambalika Nandy, Ravi Panwar, Sachin Mohanty, Sandeep Kumar Goje, Shiny Rajan, Sinjan Ghosh, Srinivas Rao Rella
FX Lead: Umesh Namdev
FX Team: Anton Zheltyakov, Voach Wang, Jade Wang, Kyle Wang, Dhaval Shashikant Bhanage, Hari Prasad Anumula
Senior Lighter: Angela Liu
Senior Compositor: Zhongyan Dai
DMP Artist: L Taylor He
Rigging Team: Garlapati Yeswanth, Kuntal Kanti Bera

Facial performance capture: Di4D