Nintendo scheint es dieses Mal wirklich ernst zu meinen mit der Werbung. Für den Werbespot von Metroid Prime haben sie den Designer Alex Proyas, der sich schon durch die Designs für die Filme The Crow und Dark City einen Namen gemacht hat, sowie die Special Effects Firma Animal Logic (The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings) engagiert.
Da der IGN Artikel leider nur für Insider freigegeben ist, gibt es leider keine Möglichkeit, dass ihr auch die Videos dazu runterladen könnt. Ich hoffe aber, dass euch wenigstens die Bilder dazu etwas Aufschluss darauf geben, was gerade in Australien gedreht wird. Ich werde dann später auch noch einige Screenshots zu den Vids nachliefern. Nun aber zum Artikel von IGN:
On Location with Samus
We take you on the set of the Metroid Prime commercial with new details, storyboards, photos and videos!
October 04, 2002 - Two weeks ago in Sydney, Australia, Nintendo began filming the television commercial for its first-person 3D action-adventure Metroid Prime. The company went on location at an abandoned power factory in Sydney, the same Hollywood hot-spot used to capture the security guard standoff sequence in the Wachowski brothers' directed The Matrix. IGN was on set to see the beginnings of what will undoubtedly be a very dark, memorable television and theatrical spot. Following, we have first-ever storyboard breakdowns, new live-action Samus Aran photographs, and videos designed to take readers through the creative process.
With that, we ask that readers note that everything they are about to see is from an unfinished work. The finalized commercial, with after effects contributions, will look significantly improved over the raw photographs and videos below.
Going for a dark, gritty, futuristic look similar to the upcoming game itself, Nintendo enlisted the help of stylistic director Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) to make the commercial. To do this, ad agency Leo Burnett and effects house Animal Logic first took a long look at Metroid Prime, picked some of their favorite environments from the first-person adventure, and then designed a series of storyboards for the purpose of re-creating the game universe for television and movie-going audiences. As a result, the spot will seem familiar in many regards to readers who have closely followed the game.
The commercial, a 60-second clip, was shot in 16x9 widescreen format so that it will fit snugly onto silver screens. Proyas used a combination of live action material, blue screen work, wire work, and post production computer graphics additions, a process currently underway. Like Nintendo's Perfect Dark ad for Nintendo 64, the spot will be geared toward an older crowd with a decidedly hip, cutting-edge feel and look. It's likely that Nintendo will try and couple the game with the debut of its Platinum GameCube, a new silver version of its console that is bound to be perceived as far cooler than the original, purple design.
Meet the storyboards. Click on the image to the left to enlarge. As readers will notice in the following videos, the basic outline for the commercial very closely resembles the introduction sequence featured in the game. In it, heroine Samus Aran, resting comfortably inside her ship, drifts slowly through a dark, foreboding outer space until she spots a floating station. The bounty hunter character lands on the adrift object and the camera cuts to a top-down view of the vehicle as Samus exits it. Then the action pans outward, highlighting the full ship and Samus atop it, whereupon she jumps upward and toward the camera. There is some live action and blue-screen work involved in this process, but most of these effects will be added through computer graphics in postproduction, according to Leo Burnett's account director Norm Yustin. "It will be similar to The Matrix kind of computer graphics so that [everything] looks real, or as real as space does look to our eyes," explained Yustin on set.
The camera will then pan around the character and zoom in on the back of her helmet to establish that gamers will actually be viewing the world through the eyes of Samus. At this point, the commercial will cut to various snippets of gameplay scenes from Metroid Prime that show off different areas and fast-paced action sequences.
Mixed in between various footage of gameplay will be several further live action and computer-generated shots of Samus running, flipping, looking around, and even rolling into her trademark morphball. There are also sequences planned in which Samus jacks into a doorway with her arm and unlocks it through a data panel -- a function that is also featured prominently in the game. According to Yustin, there will additionally be clips of computer-generated battles with some of the enemy characters in the title. There will even be a sequence in which Samus must fight against a CG version of the Parasite Queen, the first boss encounter in the game.
Lights. Camera. And action. From storyboards to live motion, from design to realization, the goal was unchanged: to bring Samus to life with the same attention to detail in the game. To do that, the crew in Sydney did a number of things. First, it created two Samus suits: one made of hardened materials and overflowing with specific details for close up shots and the other a more flexible, durable suit best used for high-action sequences. Because both suits were heavy duty in nature, the stuntwoman -- yes, it was a woman underneath it all -- was subject to intense overheating. As such, the designers of the Samus suits had to sometimes insulate them with ice packs in order to cool the insides down. As cool and realistic as readers might think Samus looks in this shot, she will appear far more refined after postproduction CG work is complete later this month.
A number of blue-screen scenes needed to be filmed in order to dub everything together for the effects house, and that's exactly what the crew focused on. In one such scene, a stuntwoman dressed as the bounty hunter hung suspended from wires, and when the cameras rolled she was swung downward and then toward a wall. When this sequence premieres in the commercial, it will look as if Samus has jumped off a ledge and then jumped up toward a wall, all with a space station exploding and sparking in the background. See it now.
Attention to detail wasn't spared for the set design, either. The crew created hexagonal doorways that closely mimic those featured in the game. A number of filmed sequences showed Samus running about illuminated paths with these types of doorways in the background. See two such examples in the video footage below.
Director Proyas and crew shot several sequences, too, in which Samus ran down a pathway and rolled. These types of action sequences are hard to do justice in actual time -- observant readers will notice that the character's shoulder pads are bouncing out of order as she runs, an effect that looks silly on camera. According to Yustin, though, all of this will be tweaked and fixed immeasurably during the postproduction process, at which point a number of computer-graphics effects will be overlaid unto the live action suit. The end result, if all goes as planned, will be a quick sequence in which a live-action Samus runs and then rolls into a computer-generated morphball -- seamless to the audience. See the beginnings of it here.
Bringing everything together are a number of character establishing shots -- basically, close-up views of Samus and her body suit. In order to effectively do this, the crew filmed the Samus stuntwoman on a blue screen background. Extremely close-up camera views then panned up and down, revealing detailed shots of her suit armor and face shield. In the video below, readers can see that the action is being shot in widescreen mode as indicated by the monitor view bars.
Once all of the shooting is done, it's off to postproduction. In the case of Proyas' Metroid Prime commercial, a good-sized chunk of the look is added during this process. Luckily for Metroid fans, a clumsy CG house won't fail to do the character justice. Respected studio Animal Logic, which did many of the effects in The Matrix, (it developed the actual Matrix code, for instance, and animated much of the AI explosion effects) and Lord of the Rings, is working on the computer graphics additions for the spot. Click below to listen to the suit designer break down the relationship with Animal Logic.
And that's a wrap. Nintendo of America told us today that the commercial should be finished in the next couple of weeks, at which point you can find it on IGN first. The company plans to premiere variations of the spot in theaters and it will only be attached to R-Rated and PG-13-Rated movies, according to Nintendo of America.
Stay tuned for much more on the commercial (and the game). In the meantime, readers are free to download additional set and Samus Aran images in our media section below.
