Banzai Games: "The backbone of the team that made Shadow Fight 3 cinematics is three people"

In mid-April, a CG trailer for the Russian fighting game Shadow Fight 3 appeared on YouTube. In the first week, it collected 1 million views. App2Top asked the head of the CG department of Banzai Games, Evgeny Kyabura, how the work on the video was going.

The first question is the budget, of course. How expensive is it to create such a video?

Evgeny Kyaburu, Head of the CG Department of Banzai Games

Evgeny Kyaburu, head of the CG department of Banzai Games: Considering that people with extensive experience in the industry took part in the project, as well as equipment and software were purchased, it turned out to be quite expensive – several hundred thousand dollars. Although for this level of cinematics it’s not so much.

How long and how many people worked on it?

EUGENE: The project consisted of several stages and lasted about two years due to the small size of the team. The number of people varied, some of them worked as freelancers. For example, animators were temporarily hired for the main volume of animation for several months. However, the backbone of three people remained throughout the project.

What did they draw in, what tools did they resort to?

Evgeniy: The main software product on the project is Autodesk Maya. All stages of production, dynamic assembly of scenes and rendering directly took place in it. Nuke was used for compositing and final assembly of the entire project.

The project looks very cool and without discounts on Russian production. Have you used ready-made solutions or have you worked on rendering yourself, additional plugins for graphics packages?

EUGENE:For the most part, we used existing solutions “out of the box”, but we also used Cascadeur’s own development – inhouse tools for “physics-based” character animation. However, the final picture is not so much the merit of the tools as the result of the talent and experience of all team members.

What was the most difficult and time/effort consuming?

Evgeniy: The most difficult was the creation of facial rigs. Based on the scanned heads of the actors, we created a set of emotions and microexpressions for our characters. Our colleagues from St. Petersburg helped us a lot in this. Guys from Digital Forms, you are real professionals, thank you!

Why do we need such videos today from a business point of view?

Evgeniy: Video content plays an important role today, and YouTube is becoming the main channel for the audience. With the help of the video, the company begins a dialogue with the players long before the game is released. The video forms a need, a desire, an emotion! And it turned out to be really like this: more than two million views is a good result. And this is only the original video, and there were also many repostings with millions of views. Moreover, even Shadow Fight 2 (the previous part of the series) has temporarily grown installations.

By the way, there is even more video content than can be seen in the video. First there was a 30-second teaser (also 2 million views), now the cinematics, its fragments are used in the trailer, then there will be endings in the game itself.

In general, the video plays a big role, and the costs for it are justified.

When developing which games do you recommend using similar content to promote the game?

Evgeniy: First of all, for those games whose audience is sitting on YouTube. So far, this is a fairly young audience, but time is passing, and it is maturing.

While working on the video, a separate 3D division appeared in Banzai Games, dealing mainly with “high-end” graphics. Is it going to make videos to order or will it work exclusively for internal projects for now?

Evgeniy: The backbone of the team that worked on the video turned into a CG department. In the future, there are plans for the development, expansion and attraction of new resources, servicing both internal and external projects.

What do you think the company learned from working on the video?

Evgeniy: Any project is unique, and, as a rule, at the end, in addition to the product, you get a team and tools, pipeline. The work on cinematics has shown that with the modern development of technology, even a small group of professionals can cope with a project of this level.