Star Citizen Live Gamedev: In-Fiction Ship Commercials

Jesse · Associate Director of Marketing Cinematics

Surprisingly similar. Because we do cinematic work, and it's linear content going to the video kind of thing, creating shots, creating edits, stringing it all together is a very similar process. The main difference here is we've got a nice real-time engine to do things out of, which is fantastic. And real-time is taking over the industry slowly, especially on Mandalorian. It was used kind of behind the scenes. So the real-time stuff is kind of coming our way. But making shots is the same way: you still compose them the same way, you still light the same way, you still build environments. And you still build the environments, of course, for what you see through the camera; everything outside the camera is a giant mess, just like in visual effects. I mean, you see Smart Hulk in Avengers, torso up, and at the bottom his legs are floating off in different directions that no one gets to see. It's the same kind of thing in both ways. You only work on what the camera gets to see. A little more forgiving on our end.

Alex · Senior Marketing Cinematics Artist

To be honest, it was a shock, but in a good way. When I started, our department... Everyone thinks about cinematics, you'll think about the guys who work on Squadron 42 and some of the PU stuff that you see in game and stuff. But when it came to the stuff we do, that was almost brand new when I started. So it was kind of a little bit of a trial by fire, where I remember joining and then it was like, OK, we're going to make a trailer for the PC Gaming Show. And I was like, OK. And what we ended up with was really cool. But it was really good fun. There was a lot of freedom in how we were doing it. And we still do it now: we touch so many different parts of the game. It's just awesome.

Alex · Senior Marketing Cinematics Artist

So this is called the Track View Editor. It's our cinematic tool that we use. Pretty much everything we do in the editor is done in here. So this is where we go in and animate our cameras, for example. There's kind of two parts to it. Like any animation software, you've got the dope sheet on the left, which is where you see all your keyframes and stuff in a linear timeline. And then what you've also got with that is a graph editor. These two are pretty much the main tools that you would use for any kind of animation. So this is where we'll go in and, for example, animate the camera, and what we'll do with the characters is place down the characters within the scene and basically apply some animations that we create for them. And pretty much everything can be controlled in here, from cameras and characters and what they do, to some settings that we can apply in the editor, which are quite similar to the graphics settings you get in game, just a few additional overrides that we can make use of and keyframe on a per-instance basis. So on one shot you might want one graphics feature; on another shot you might want something a little bit different, so we can actually change all that. And then we've got options here for lighting as well. So for example, we've got the lights on Maddy's handcuffs that we can keyframe, along with these light group controls, which are like light switches within the ship. And going back to what Jesse mentioned earlier about working with in-development ship assets, when this started out, this was actually a copy of what the ship team were working on when they were creating the internal parts of the ship. I'm not going to go into that, obviously, because that's not what I do and I wouldn't be in the best place to talk about that. But it's pretty much a copy of it. So we actually work with the live assets that they're working on and receive updates from them as we go, which is really cool.

Alex · Senior Marketing Cinematics Artist

So it starts off, at the very, very beginning, with the initial concept for what we're going to do. I'll be honest, I can't remember the exact concept we had for this, but obviously it was a concept for what we ended up with. And then that idea gets developed; we work very closely with the narrative team. And that idea gets developed into a full script, almost like a screenplay, like what you'd have for any kind of film or TV show. And from there, that's when we really start diving into the details. For example, in this case, and I can actually show you an example, that's when we actually start storyboarding it and getting an idea for how the visuals and the pacing will look. So in this case, for this shot here, I went and grabbed some versions of it. What you end up with in that early phase is something like this, where we've got the same basic idea. Again, we didn't know the exact workings of the ship at this previous stage, which is why it looks a bit different. But you've got that phase where you've got Maddy coming out of the turret, and then Alex Dugan coming in, and then her putting the handcuffs on. And that gives us an idea of where we want to go from there.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I want to add here that these ship commercial ideas can come from anywhere. We're very open to good ideas regardless of where they come from. So when these things really get started at the very beginning, it's literally all hands on deck. We have pitch meetings where the artists themselves can pitch ideas, where the folks from the community team can pitch ideas, where our dedicated marketing folks can pitch ideas. Very occasionally, if there's ever an actual developer who's really passionate and wants to get in, we'll take ideas from them, and we present them in an open group and we all discuss the merits and the drawbacks of each scenario, whether they're actually feasible and whatnot. It's a very collaborative process. And then when we have an idea that most of us are happy with that we want to pursue, as Alex said, we'll rope in the narrative team and be like, OK, you guys are writers. This is the kind of story we want to tell. What can you do with this? So after the writers start to work stuff out, we're back to, as you can see here, the storyboard process. Now, these are more than storyboards. These are animatics.

Jesse · Associate Director of Marketing Cinematics

Can I jump in there real quick? It's a very unique process here. We kind of do that because we are such a small team overall. But this is something you would never see in the visual effects industry at all. By the time anything comes our way, it's been in production for a year or two, and everything's kind of locked down. So giving artists the ability to give input on something as early as the ideation, even in the scripting phase, is pretty unheard of in a lot of places. So it's a fantastic place to be if you have a lot of good ideas.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I don't think we've moved away. We've just expanded beyond that so that we don't have to do the same thing.

Jesse · Associate Director of Marketing Cinematics

This one trailer, I think, is the more specific example. I think this was our first attempt at doing a really story-driven narrative, which we haven't really done before, just to see where it goes, what we can do with it, how far we can push it, how it gets received, so if everyone likes it, maybe we do more of them. In general, it is still all very car commercial-y for everything else, but this was kind of our first attempt at something new and bigger and bolder.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

To an extent. The Banu Defender one, I think, stretched its legs quite a bit.

Jesse · Associate Director of Marketing Cinematics

The Banu, yeah. The 890 was another one that was pretty close.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You don't want to just keep doing the same thing and change all the adjectives, change all the graphics. A commercial for an Origin ship looks like a commercial for a Drake ship, looks like a commercial for a MISC ship. It really depends on how we're feeling at the time when we start, what kind of mood we're in. Like, oh, we've done three or four standard ship commercials. Now let's break out and do something different. Let's keep things fresh, not just for our viewers, but for us.

Alex · Senior Marketing Cinematics Artist

That's when we turn around with this and say, let's make a movie.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yes, and this one was like, let's make a little movie. It's about pushing ourselves, too, and seeing what we can accomplish.

Alex · Senior Marketing Cinematics Artist

Exactly. And the reason we picked this one is I don't think there's been any other project, just because of the size of it, where I've learned nearly as much in such a short span of time. Same for all the guys, just because of what we were doing with it. Challenges are fun.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That's not a question for the marketing cinematics team, folks. When it comes time for this system to be in development, and that won't be anytime soon, it'll be up to Ian Leyland and members of the environment team to determine whether they want to go back and look at this for reference or whether they want to create something brand new and wholly original. So there is just no answer to that question at this time.