Infinite Ammo

By now you’ve probably already seen the Marian teaser – but how did it get made? Well… it was a focused and intense experience compressed into about 6 days of crazy work – most of which was done while I was staying at my friend Adam‘s house in Austin.

How do you put together a teaser trailer in under a week while travelling in a foreign country? It helps if you know some really talented people.

Read More for the full story…

Liem Nguyen, a talented Winnipeg-based 3d modeler and animator was already working with me on some concepts for the game. I decided right before I left on my trip that I wanted show a video as part of my talk. We didn’t have a lot of time to get this done!

I started with a simple concept of what we could do given the time constraints that would be interesting to see. I enlisted the help of my sister Eileen to physically act out the part of Marian so we could quickly and clearly define exactly what her movements were. We also planned the camera’s path while blocking out the scene this way.

I then wrote the musical accompaniment so I could start work on the sound mix right away. This was a good idea – I ended up with a decent amount of time to fine-tune the sound effects and get the atmosphere right. Once the music was roughed out, it seemed like everything else that I needed to do could be done in Austin. And way you go!

This video was sent to Liem who quickly animated the model to match the reference with surprisingly accuracy. Liem and I went back and forth over email about various details of the model, the “butterfly” and the environment. Things were progressing well, but we hadn’t hit texturing yet and the deadline was closing in.

Liem soon realized that he wouldn’t have enough time to texture everything given the amount of polishing he wanted to do, so we called in reinforcements. I phoned Ben Ruiz from Flashbang Studios over in Phoenix. He was down for giving it a shot. We had two days before the content would have to be locked down.

It might have been a challenge to figure out how to communicate what I was looking for effectively with Liem in Winnipeg and Ben in Phoenix while I was in Austin. Fortunately, Adam was also down for helping out. For about half an hour we ran around his house examining various wood grains from different angles to figure out what would look best on Marian.

Ben stepped up to the plate and delivered wonderful textures on an insane deadline. Liem put it all together, and got everything to me in time to create a final edit the day before my talk.

Thanks to the combination of friendship, talent and dedication we managed to make something pretty cool – and I can’t wait to get to work on making this game world come to life.

If you also can’t wait and would like to lend a hand, for 10 measly dollars you can help support the production of Marian. You’ll receive credit in the final release as a “friend of Marian”. Every little bit helps!

P.S. Big bits help too! Thanks to all who already donated and an extra thank you to those who went above and beyond the $10 minimum. <3