Kevin Durant | Activision | Warzone Mobile
Altered FX wrote, designed, and directed this announcement trailer for Activision, Call of Duty Mobile, and Kevin Durant. Our mission: To introduce Kevin Durant to the Call of Duty world with style and swagger that only KD5 has. For the intense 5 week production, Altered rushed to produce a concept that would coincide with Call of Duty / Warzone proper. Altered brought a dramatic neo-gothic look and feel to the visuals while injecting some subtle anime-style flavor to the action. All of this was done carefully to maintain the integrity of the mobile game world.
“We had this idea to incorporate a moody, Eyes Wide Shut with lowkey anime-style action based on our discussions with Activision. The trickiest part was finding a concept and a level of violence that Activision and Kevin Durant’s team were comfortable with.” says David Weinstein, Altered’s Co-Founder and Creative Director. The environmental team created a massive gothic-style cathedral using AI to procedurally generate architecture based on prebuilt structures. A full-size regulation basketball court was then carefully fused into the environment. “When we first discussed how we were going to incorporate a basketball court into a stone and marble cathedral I was a bit skeptical. We didn’t want to make the environment look silly. It had to be done with style so that it was taken seriously. The last thing we wanted was for people to see the setting and think it was meant to be funny”.
When it came time to animate Kevin Durant, Altered choose to use hand key-frame animation for the entire video. “For us, making sure Kevin Durant actually looked and moved like Kevin Durant was important. But we also wanted to have some style to his movement. That’s something really fun about the Call of Duty Mobile world, we are not bound to hyperrealism. We can have some fun and push things. I think that is where Altered superpower comes into play. We love creating stylized realism and bridging real-world aspects with stylized CG and animation elements. That’s kind of our thing.” says Weinstein.
