Platige Image’s Trailer For ‘Hyper Scape’ Looks More Exciting Than Most CG Feature Trailers
To find the freshest approaches in commercial cg animation, it pays to look beyond the standardized theatrical cg features at more unlikely sources, like game trailers and cinematics.
Hyper Scape is a new first-person shooter from Ubisoft, the beta version of which has just launched for PC. Ubisoft has also released a dazzling new trailer for the game, which was produced by the Warsaw-based Platige Image. Watch it below:
The trailer sets up the premise of this original IP, namely: in some dystopian near future, people enter the vast virtual space known as Hyper Scape to engage in a fast-paced fight for survival. Cue chases through a vertiginous world that looks like a cyberpunk Paris — a notably claustrophobic world for a battle royal.
The characters dash parkour-like through this space, their animation based in performance capture. Platige Image was closely involved with every stage of the trailer’s production, from scriptwriting to character modeling and the staging of the action.
The studio, which specializes in cgi and vfx, is an old hand at cinematics: it previously created trailers for Ubisoft games like Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Watch Dogs 2. It has made a name for itself with its vfx work, such as for the Netflix series The Witcher, and its commercials and short films, including the “Fish Night” segment in Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots and the Oscar-nominated The Cathedral.
The Hyper Scape trailer was helmed by Bartek Kik, who has directed shorts and commercials with Platige since 2007. “We became involved in this project very early in the global production of the game,” he said. “We had access to its very first versions, and then to a constantly updated build at Ubisoft’s headquarters in Montreal. So, you might say that, together, we went through all the exciting but challenging phases of building of a new IP.”
Adds Agata Bereś, cg Producer at Platige, “For the mocap session we spent five days on the set, with two days for capturing the main elements and one day for try out, one for additional photos, and another for the faceware session. It was really key to showcase fluidity and dynamism in the movement, so we worked with the amazing Maciek Kwiatkowski and two fantastic parkour artists; Monika Mińska and Jakub Grossman.”
The full launch of Hyper Scape is scheduled for later this summer on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
The production had a staff of 130 people. A few of the key credits:
Client: Ubisoft Montreal
Director: Bartłomiej Kik
CG supervisor: Bartosz Skrzypiec
Art. director: Karol Klonowski
CG producer: Agata Bereś
Executive producer: Piotr Prokop
Head of cg: Bartłomiej Witulski
Head of production: Magdalena Machalica
