“Call of Duty: Ghosts” Cinematic Storyboards – Part 4

This sequence was the load movie for the final mission of the video game- the big showdown, the final push of the forces of good versus the forces of evil.  D-Day.  Armageddon.  All in.  The plan?  Knock out the satellite defenses in orbit which will allow the tank forces to breach the command control center and commit an all-out assault on the enemy position.

On the left are my original boards, and on the right are the screenshots from the final movie.  They diverge a bit in the middle- there was a lot of concern from the producers about the production schedule and while we had to make sure this movie carried a lot of visual impact, we had to be realistic about the time it would take to produce it, and so we streamlined some of the visuals in order to ensure the delivery date.  Still, I was really proud of my boards on this one.

These frames feature a lot of cool motion blur effects- something I wanted to incorporate to really sell the realistic action of the speed and force of the tanks crashing into the rocky ground and rocketing toward their target.  I’m a big fan of the Starcraft and Command and Conquer games, and I drew a lot of influence from the load movies that accompanied those mission levels.

Another cool thing I did on these board in particular is that I used Google Sketchup to find and view free 3D models of space shuttles and tanks and airplanes.  This is a really useful strategy when you need to get a really dynamic angle on a vehicle or building, because even though there’s lots of photos to reference online, many of them are not from the proper viewing perspective and therefore they have a flattened sense of spacial distortion.  So I used this technique to find drawing angles of what it might look like if a tank came hurtling out of the sky and landed on top of you.  Good times.

So that’s it for the “Call of Duty: Ghosts” posts.  I worked on a few other sequences but I wanna start talking about other stuff, so next year we’ll look at more boards and I’ll continue to share some tips and techniques I find helpful.  Have a great new year!