The Mill and Mill+ joined forces with Neversoft, Infinity Ward and Paul Mitchell for a DLC intro in Activision's 'Call of Duty: Extinction.'
The sequence begins with the character's discovery of an obelisk, which sucks them into a brief glimpse of a dark, futuristic earth, only to suddenly face a terrifying underwater creature and be thrown into the next level. 3D lead artist Felix Urquiza of The Mill and creative director Paul Mitchell of Mill+ led the animation and design teams in the full-CG project.
When it comes to the design portion, Mitchell describes: "We storyboarded everything on pencil then into previs animation. Once we had that right, we went on set and motion-captured all the scenes with actors and reference props in place. We spent a lot of time on set not only capturing body motion, but directing performances. We used the performance footage as a rough cut to get the sequence and pacing of interactions right. Then we moved into full CG - rendering, texturing, lighting, animation and effects. That's where we met one of the biggest challenges in the intro: building the faces of the characters. They're incredibly detailed and so many variables go into that process."
Urquiza adds: "Before throwing in all the CG we relied on style frames to set the overall tone and look for each setting. My team's biggest challenge was working with just a few people within a short time frame to build high-quality, incredibly complex environments - the cave, the water, the skull sequence. The team did a great job of executing all the environments in the time we had."
The DLC action doesn't end here. The Mill and Mill+ tackled a host of additional sequences for Activision. View them here.
VFX & Design: Mill+
Executive Producer: Kim Wildenburg
Director & Creative Director: Paul Mitchell
Senior VFX Producer: Will Lemmon
VFX Coordinators: Antonio Hardy, Jacqueline Sand
Art Directors & Lead Compositors: Eugene Gauran, Ed Laag
3D Lead Artist: Felix Urquiza
Storyboard Artists: Max Forward, Brian Yang
Matte Painters: Peggy Chung, Gizem Ersavas, Darin Hilton, Thom Price, Rasha Shalaby, Andy Wheater
After Effects Artist: Justin Demetrician, Ben Hurand, Joe Kutilek
Compositors: Victor Duncan, Kevin Flores, Eugene Gauran, Asif Haque, Patrick Heinen, Scott Johnson, Ed Laag, Robin McGloin, Tim Robbins, Daniel Thuresson,
Effects Artists: Hartwell Durfor, Denis Gauthier, Ashraf Ghoniem, Jenna Kind
Lighting & Rendering: Simon Brown, Robert Chapman, Kenzie Chen, Kelvin Lian, James Ma, Milton Ramirez, Felix Urquiza, Kim Vongbunyong
Modeling & Texture: Charlotte Akeurst, Matt Bohnert, Krystal Sae Eua, David Fleet, Chris Goodrich, Margaux Huneau, Kristan Kelly, Leo Krajden, Kelvin Lian, Siran Liu, James Ma, James Mulholland, Blake Sullivan, Maggie Toh, Jose Trujillo, Felix Urquiza, Danny Yoon,
Rigging: Jacob Bergman, Fabian Elmers, Blake Guest, Steven Olson
Animators: Alfonso Alpuerto, Ed Boldero, Scott Beharrel Bono, Tracie Cotta, Kiel Figgins, Blake Guest, Daniel Kmet, Billy Vu Lam, Jeffrey Lee, Bradley McLaughlin, Josh Sterling, Sauce Villas, Juan Zavala
Editors: Luke Kraman, Victor Jory
Developer: Neversoft, Infinity Ward
Publisher: Activision Publishing Inc.
Director: Scott Pease, Peter Day
Cinematic Director: Sylvain Doreau
Story: Brad Santos
Audio: Stephen Miller, Charles Deenen
Colour: The Mill
Executive Producer, Colour: LaRue Anderson
Colour Producer: Natalie Westerfield
Colourist: Shane Reed