Guitar Hero Live
Framestore was extremely proud to announce their collaboration with Activision and Freestyle Games on the re-birth of the pop culture phenomenon Guitar Hero. The brand new controller delivered an entirely new immersive experience, with live-action crowds dynamically reacting to the player's every move, as well as a raft of other new features.
Dynamic Crowds
Framestore was given the huge task of set-extending the varied CG environments and creating the dynamic midground and background CG crowds for the game, with collaboration from the Capture Lab, lighting, animation, crowd technical directors, texture artists, modellers, riggers, trackers and yet more from the Film, Commercials and Digital divisions, totalling 129 crew.
The team needed to create the emotions in the crowd as they change, depending on the abilities of the player, so the amount of data captured was staggering. Normal VFX film shots are around 200 frames long; with the average song coming out at over 6,000 frames, the scale of the project was unprecedented.
We were collaborating with all the different departments, from the lighting team to the motion capture crew, and during shoots we had to make sure all of the camera moves, stage lighting, and music were in sync.
From the Top
Framestore was consulted at a conceptual stage, with proof of concept tests and pilots conducted by the digital, commercials and live action production departments. Once these had been approved the work really got going, with various shoots and mo-cap sessions held to capture a range of audience reactions to the diverse genres of music present in the game.
We designed a bespoke system that captured all of the data from the lighting of the shoot, including light intensity, colour, position and motion. This allowed us to replicate the exact conditions in the 3D world we then created.
Bringing It Together
The team then had to figure out how to arrange the live action band, crowd and lighting material with all the CG elements, blending everything together seamlessly to create the massive crowd simulations and photoreal environments.
Creating realistic environments for the bands to play in was also a challenge for the CG team, with texture artists and compositors working on seven separate venues. All this work was topped off with a grade from Edwin Metternich.
We completed over six hours' worth of VFX footage, the equivalent of more than three big-scale VFX movies.
Credits
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