MotorStorm: Pacific Rift

I was Creative Lead/Senior Artist on MS:PR, supporting the Art Director with anything from high level visual briefs to individual character or livery concepts, still and video moodboards for objects and environments, lighting/environments, tools and processes, in addition to part of my role from the original MotorStorm dealing with CG cinematics and promotional movies such as the Festival/GUI Cinematics.

Announcement Promo/X-Movie

(Not final version)

My aim for this movie was to make people wonder what they were seeing and then slap them with “…it’s MotorStorm!”. The original was set in a barren, brown desert so for this I developed a brief for two CG houses, Ark VFX who’d delivered a knock-out blow with the MotorStorm Festival/GUI movies) and RealtimeUK, who’d done a similarly excellent job with MotorStorm’s E3 2005 trailer.

The second portion, RTUK’s ‘X-Movie’ style action sequence, was harshly edited into Ark’s far more serene and beautiful island approach, which began with what was missing from the original game – life. After briefly passing The Carrier (seen in the Festival cinematics and PlayStation Home), the camera flies up above the clouds and then plunges the viewer into the jungle environment, mid-race.

Intro

Sony were keen to retain the epic aerial HD theme of the original MotorStorm, which was filmed in Monument Valley, but updated for the even more breathtaking Pacific location. Sadly, I was busy washing my hair when a small team were sent out to Hawaii to shoot hours of source material for the intro movie which doubled as a huge library of reference material.

I looked after the latter stages of the project – overall edit, game edit, grading, title – but unlike the first intro I had very little involvement with the CG which was handled by Escape Studios.