The Surge

Trailer and in-games cinematics for the game The Surge

CLIENT  Capsule Studio

YEAR  2016

The Surge is the first project of the new post-production studio Capsule based in Paris, produced by Focus Interactive and developed by Deck13 this Action-RPG game take place in a dystopian Future.
As a brand new studio we were a small team, but used to work together, we had 4 and half months to start from scratch and deliver those 6:16 minutes of this dystopian world called The Surge.

My role was to produce all the cinematic assets, from the armors to ennemies, weapons but also environments, props, pre-lighting for the ambiance of the shots and scene assembly of a part of the trailer. It was a lot of responsibilities on a really short deadline.
The anatomy work with the two characters and the cloths were made by the talented Character Artist Julien Nicolas.

If I had to define my main goal on The Surge in one word it will be: Efficiency. To find the best balance between quality, realism and productivity.

Surgery

For the surgery sequence the process was a bit different, the bed was only existing as a very low poly model and was clearly not designed to be functional for a full surgery sequence in close up, and the robotic arms weren’t existing.I had to rework the bed from scratch, keeping only the global silhouette of the game asset and I had to design the arms to make the surgery sequence possible.

They had to be able to grab mechanics pieces and screw them, some welding/laser tools were also necessary. I decided to split the robotic arms in two category.The first one is the Clamp version, positioned on ground, their task is only to grab and put in place the pieces, to facilitate the operation the second category is positioned on the roof, like this the space is better exploited and avoid some possible collision between the different arms.

This second category is multi-tooled, it can drill, screw, cut or weld. The head of the arm is customizable like the drill tool you have in your garage. Having a multi tool arm permit to reduce the number of necessary arms. The surgery doesn’t need multiple tools at same moment, its split in different steps: from cutting to drilling to screwing and finally welding.

On its side the bed had to be designed to make the surgery possible, it mean Warren, the hero, had to be attached and the bed must be reachable by the arms and have the perfect shape to host Warren and the Exo. I had to cut a lot inside it to add some access for the arms and make some places for the volume of the Exo. The bed is also partially articulated to allow different positions and increase the percent of area and angle to access. Functionality was the main word here, even if the design and production phase was quick it was a really interesting experience to make this surgical operation work.