BEHIND THE SCENES Of THE DAWN Of WAR III TRAILER
Abed Abonamous and Gareth Hector walk us through the thought processes that powered the award-winning Dawn of War III announcement trailer, released one year before the game itself
“Relic Entertainment approached us with a brief that was both concise and open in equal measures,” reveals Abed Abonamous, director.
“Warhammer 40K and Dawn of War usually produce a certain type of cinematic: compressed battle scenes highlighting various units, often structured to culminate in some sort of plot twist or suspenseful reveal. This is mostly portrayed in photoreal or hyperreal state-of-the-art CG.
“The issue that we immediately encountered was that even just thinking through that type of approach amounted to going through the motions. We’ve seen it all before in various degrees of quality. It feels like in the vast landscape of the Warhammer
40K lore, depictions are often reduced to tiny little sub-stories. That’s to be expected for a short cinematic, but the big picture of a messed-up universe caught in endless and senseless all-encompassing war, the shadow of certain doom that covers everything – that picture was almost never painted.
“So our proposal to Relic was to ditch both the conventional cinematic narrative structure as well as the usual look. Instead, we wanted to push a certain feel, an atmosphere, less story and more nightmare, disjointed, seemingly unstructured and powered by the gravity and symbolism of its images as opposed to a winding plot. In a way, we wanted the fans to experience the crushing weight of hopelessness that is so integral to WH40K, where every triumph is a short-lived illusion and all are ultimately destined to the proverbial meat grinder.
“We wrote a script that had no plot to speak of and was instead a collection of vignettes from various, often unrelated places in the WH40K universe. Each and any of these vignettes could presumably be happening in any place throughout the galaxy and at any time. Each vignette should communicate something about the factions depicted within it, but the POV should remain neutral and distanced, never
emotionally invested. Despair was to be the undertone of every frame.
“We also looked for inspiration on visual style to go with this script, and immediately focused on a late polish artist called Beksinski. His take on surrealism felt like the perfect fit for our approach, and the task of translating the qualities of paintings, let alone this kind of painting, into CG was both daunting and a wonderful challenge for the entire team. The stark, low-key lighting, the colourful yet freaky detailing, the grotesque contorted designs and the foreboding hazedrenched atmosphere were all elements that felt very relevant for the Dawn of War III trailer, and each of those elements brought its own set of difficulties in production.
“To our surprise and excitement, Relic was on board with this rather daring approach, and so we started to break down the big picture into specific details. Despite anticipating a challenge, we were still caught a bit off guard by just how much the script and style changed our usual process. To explain the changes, let’s look at a sample shot. In this shot, the script describes three giant walker units known as Wraithknights roaming seemingly aimlessly through a ruinous landscape made of bones.
“A possible conventional approach would seek to instil awe at the giant beings, for example by putting the camera close to ground and having it track and tilt, possibly with a handheld feel and reactions to a vibrating ground and explosions, to emphasise the sheer size and power of the Wraithknights and to infuse adrenaline into the presentation. Instead, we opted for a flat, very wide composition, relying on haze to sell the scale of the scenery and units, and went for a static, distanced and unbothered camera. In effect we created a painting, albeit with some motion to it. The scene as completed feels otherworldly and distant yet foreboding, and instead of thrilling or entertaining the viewer, it simply wants to linger and haunt.
“The same line of thought continued into determining colour and lighting. To remain somewhat surreal, we opted for mushy shading based on mostly a single top light, and let atmospheric effects like fog and haze tell most of the visual story. Instead of highlighting details throughout the scene we went for a silhouetted, ‘lost in fog’ feel that echoes a distant nightmare as opposed to a clear narrative. There is no glory in this scene, in a way the Wraithknights are portrayed in a drab, death-bound manner.
“We were very selective in the amount of detail that each shot contained. for the Wraithknights, we opted to give a hint of the giant bone towers as well as some detailing on one Wraithknight’s head and torso. Other than that, the frame is almost a blur, fading between haze and silhouettes. We highlighted the details via lighting but also devised a compositing process to blur edges where we wanted a more painterly feel.
“This thought process was applied throughout the cinematic, resulting in many static shots almost devoid of motion that sell an atmosphere instead of action or plot. Throughout the project we were always conscious of how every aspect of
“To remain surreal, we opted for mushy shading based on mostly a single Top light, and let atmospheric effects like fog and haze Tell most of The visual story” Abed Abonamous, Director, Axis Animation
our process had to be questioned, and how our instincts would often lead us towards a conventional storytelling approach that we knew and enjoyed, but wasn’t relevant for this specific cinematic. Often enough we’d stop in our tracks and take a few steps back to analyse whether we had fallen into any mental pitfalls that made us like what we were creating but also made it conventional and took away from its intended impact. All this questioning and re-thinking ultimately paid off as we delivered a cinematic that is decidedly different.”
Gareth Hector – art director:
“As art director of the Dawn of War III trailer I distinctly remember listening to Abed’s initial vision of recreating Beksinski’s art style in his trailer treatment. It was an exciting and terrifying prospect in equal measure, undoubtedly a challenge to recreate the macabre, wonderful surreal painted world of Beksinski in 3D, yet a fantastic opportunity to embrace.
“perhaps the greatest challenge was visualising how something so intrinsically two dimensional could be replicated in a moving, animated piece. Abed was keen to honour Beksinski’s commitment to the confines of the canvas. Compositions that used the canvas dimensions to augment his subject matter, mixed with the impossible physical nature of his figures and environments, were part of the discussion.
“Initial talks mooted the idea of working with a 3.4 screen ratio, typical requirements of wide screen epic camera moves were not keeping with the target style. There was not going to be sprawling vistas, nor were we going to fill the screen with explosions and action. This was all about an unrelenting mood of despair and inevitability.
“To further complicate matters we had to stay true to the core franchise,
Warhammer 40K. How far could we push these well established and loved characters?
Warhammer has a tangible grounding in its style, big, bold and solid, yet Beksinski’s art is full of fleeting nightmarish visions; frail, grotesque and impossible to quantify. Environmentally we believed we were on solid ground in our vision; a suffocating fog permeated by strange otherworldly structures was the way to go.
“With that in mind we focused on character exploration. This began by taking renders of in-game models and painting over them. Through an iterative process we developed each character to varying levels of surrealism.
“for example, the Ork Boy at one point had his shoulder opened up to reveal snapping eyeless heads inside; the Gretchin’s jaw was made up of two hands clasped together; pieces of the Wraithknight broke off its back and formed into free-floating layers of cloth behind him, and so it went.
“What we found was that as we pushed these characters further into the Beksinski world they began to lose their most vital identity; that of Warhammer. As a result, we started to dial things back, although we were still able to use some of the core tropes of the target style within them.
“The Wraithknight is a case in point. It’s still very much Warhammer, but its limbs were longer, distended with a sense of decaying bone. The shell-like parts of its armour were contrasted with a blackened core, with photo reference lifted from
charred trees. The idea was to play with dimensions and surface treatments to subtly alter these characters so they belonged in our nightmarish landscape.
“Character art was first produced in greyscale; it was important to concentrate at this stage on form and fidelity of detail. Once approved we then moved to a colour pass. for example, the Wraiths were visualised as ancient behemoths, so layers of weathering such as rain streaking, ingrained grime and discolouration were added at this stage.
“When complete, the modeller was then supplied with the concept and brief. Due to the intricate and deliberate style of the characters, a lot of back and forth was necessary to ensure the 3D model retained the established look of the 2D artwork. It was a long and sometimes difficult process but the end results warranted the effort.
“The Wraith reveal was actually one of the first scenes in which we explored the environment in pre-production. Artwork for this specific location was developed through the initial pitch, earliest pre-production concepts and finally colour scripting.
“for the pre-production phase, the scene was concepted primarily as a mood piece. We knew that the fogging of the environment was extremely important, particularly the density, colour and placement. Abed was also keen to use the fog to break up the outlines of both characters and landscape, just as Beksinski does. This actually proved to be a real challenge once the scene went into 3D. Having the control over the fog falloff in areas that were sometimes no more than an arm’s length away was extremely difficult.
“Beksinski’s choices to haze out sections of his compositions are done in a very deliberate manner, it’s another tool he uses to focus the eye and embellish his storytelling. for us, we very much looked at the fog almost like another character in the scene. It was vital that our volumes and placement aided the overall narrative of the shot, just as Beksinski does in his paintings.
“As we developed the scene in layout and animation, we then introduced colour scripts to the process. Although we were fundamentally repeating the same approach to the environments, we looked at the palette as a defining factor to give each scene its own vibe and identity.
“We tended to pick out key artworks of Beksinski’s as being representative of a particular scene. However, although this worked in some cases, in others we moved away from our source reference towards something that perhaps looked stronger when in context.
“Due to the surreal quality of the piece it was important that our environments were not representative of a time and place, or anything particularly definable for that matter. for instance, our colour choices for the fog tended to be unusual colours like bright greens, purples, turquoises, etc. This is similar to Beksinski in the sense that despite the sombre nature of his subjects, he usually counters these with vivid palette choices in very localised and unusual areas of the canvas.
“We also didn’t want anything that could be perceived as sunlight, so the light stayed pretty much constant to camera position. We also simplified our lighting setups as much as possible. Although the instinct was to put lights in to flesh out details, or perhaps make things more readable, these dynamic choices jarred with the target style. In this case less was certainly more.
“When we began the lighting and comping phase of scenes, I found the best way to convey feedback was to directly paint over outputs. This was very much due to the nature of the beast. Our piece had strong roots in a two-dimensional world, so all of us really weren’t sure about how we were going to implement those qualities in 3D. Everything has a deliberate place in a painting, easy to accommodate in a single frame, that through a moving piece is another story. painting over frames, rather than just giving notes, helped us generate a clear understanding of what was needed to push the shot to our core goals.”
“although The instinct was To put lights in To flesh out details, These choices jarred with The Target style” Gareth Hector, Art Director, Axis Animation