Battle for Middle-earth II Designer Diary

Battle for Middle-earth II is doing a lot of things including structuring the campaign differently. One of the ways EA LA is keeping the story cohesive throughout the directed single player campaign is cinematic sequences using the game's engine. Along with the designer diary below detailing the process, we've been gifted with some artwork and a couple of movies showing off the original storyboarding along with the final cut for comparison. As you can see from these short scenes, the game is looking pretty darn good at this point in development. Make sure to check the movies out in the video section after you've read through the article!

I am Richard Taylor, the Cinematic Director on the The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II.

Like many in the gaming industry, my background is in film making. I've been a commercial director for close to 30 years and I've also been a special effects director for feature films, but now I'm working in games. I think gaming is the cutting edge of new media and as such it is where the most interesting visual work is evolving.

As the Cinematic Director I design the game opening and closing sequences as well as the campaign and mission introductions and endings. The design docs are filled with intricate details on who, what, when, where and why things need to happen in a mission. A cinematic sequence is composed of multiple shots or scenes.

The basic steps taken in creating the cinematic scenes are as follows: I begin by storyboarding sequences based on what is described in the game's design documents. I draw thumbnail sketches of the shots in a sequence and then talk my storyboard artists through the shots before they draw the final storyboards. Next we make an animatic, which is sort of a moving storyboard that allows us to get a sense of how the sequence flows. I have five cinematic artists working with me who are each assigned specific sequences. They work with the software tools we've built for our game, which include a really neat new camera system. Once they start building a scene it usually takes two or three iterations to get a shot refined. When I'm happy with a shot I cut the scene into the sequence, add sound and music, and some post effects. Our cinematic sequences are designed to tell the players an ongoing story and at the same time show them the state of the strategy in the game. Since, most of the cinematic intros are thirty seconds to a minute long; I have to make the sequences both concise and entertaining.

In this year's game, creating the cinematic sequences is far more exciting because for the first time we have the unified rights to The Lord of the Rings books as well as the films. Because of this, we are now introducing lands, characters, and creatures that appeared in the books but were not in the movies. Consequently, the cinematics become even more important for informing the player of the story as the players may have never seen or heard of these lands and characters

One of the ways we're telling this story is by using Hugo Weaving as a storyteller/ voiceover. We're also using beautiful classic paintings done by several incredible artists. During the sequences we make transitions between paintings and animated scenes to bring the painting to life. It's a nice segue into the cinematic scenes. At the end of a mission, we reverse the process. That is, a scene you are watching evolves into a painting.

Traditional film making artists like me are evolving into the gaming industry because the production values of filmmaking are now becoming essential to the future of games. I've chosen to be in games because to me it's a lot more creative and a lot more fun. Designing the world-class visuals that we're able to produce in games these days is personally very rewarding to me.

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