Spov
I've had the pleasure to join the awesome team at SPOV and be part of Activision's Black Ops Series
(I used to play way too much CoD back in the days to let this one slide)
Over the course of roughly a year (which felt like 3 years once lockdown hit us) we've developed a visual aesthetic that turned Call Of Duy: Black Ops Cold War's single player mode cinematics into an era appropriate cold war spy movie nostalgia trip.
We mixed 3D scenes with archival footage, recreated a lot of high res 2D maps and documents, while also shooting off an old CRT monitor with some good old signal interferrence (read: wiggling the cable)
I was leading the 3D team through the whole process from modelling in Cinema4D and texturizing assets in Substance Painter, over assembling and lighting the 3D scenes, to wrangling the big amount of Redshift renders we had to deliver on a very tight schedule towards the end.
The whole process was a massive learning experience for everyone (not just because we were forced to work from home at some point, spoiler alert: remotely working on two 4K screens is very impractical, bandwidth wise) and I'm really proud of the whole team and the end result.
We have also managed to keep the whole compositing pipeline fairly Adobe free, which by itself was quite a milestone for us. Blackmagic Fusion will be my compositing software of choice for future projects of that calibre and I can only recommend it to anyone who doesn't have the budget for a Nuke license.
Studio Head: Allen Leitch
Creative Directors: Mantas Grigaitis and Agnes Kasilovska
Head of Production: Jasmine Christmas
Director of Operations: Jacqueline Clarke
Art Direction: Mantas Grigaitis and Dave Penn
3D Supervisor: Florian Thamer
3D Team: Julio Dean, Roger Chiaw, James Brocklebank, Ferdinando Spagnolo, Lisander Qorri, Batu Cologlu, Jon Yeo, Matt Polechoński, Helder Ferreira, Ryan Close
2D Team: Simon Staines, Samantha Thompson, Sean McNulty, Thomas Pircher, Chris Sayer, Jason Pickthall
Compositing: Luíz Afonso Mota, Danit Klibansky, David Mir
Archivist: Jen Owen
Production: Didem Bayrak, Tim Rabjohns, Valentina König
Research: Martynas Stoskus, Vincent Kane, Steve Bergson, Gerry Healy, Alexey Kormilitsyn
Development: Gordon Spurs, Keko Ahmed, Julian Harding, Kieran Gee Finch, Craig Herd