These Story articles are aimed to tell you more about the challenges we had to face during the production. My name is Stéphane Montel and I directed the trailer and supervised its production with my colleague Mhamed Elmezoued. Both of us are co-founder of Capsule Studio. Prior to that, we acted as CG Artists and Supervisor in several companies in Paris. In June 2013, we decided to fill the spare time between commercial projects by working on a personal one. (more…)
End of August 2013, the storyboard is finished. We were ready to prepare the project logistic : ressources, schedule, team… As you can see from the storyboard, we moved away from our basic intention to make a 30 seconds teaser. And after 8+ years of experience in this industry, we managed to convince ourselves that it was possible to make a 1 minute and 30 seconds full CG trailer in about six months with a volunteer team and in our spare time. Crazy? Yep. The first tasks to launch were pilot design, vector design, selection of references and previs. (more…)
October 2013. At this point, the main stages of pre-production are underway or completed. It’s time to launch the production of the main 3d assets : pilot, vectors, environments.
While some artists have come to work at NKI Studio where Mhamed and myself were employees, a large part of the work was made through teleworking. (more…)
November 2013. The Vector Hero model is complete and rigged. Animators can begin their work, relying on timing, cameras and scenes used in the previs. The Vector Villain model is also in work in progress and should soon be ready so that all the spaceships shots will be ready for animation!
The project suffers from a slight delay on what was expected, but nothing to worry about. Things are progressing well, almost as fast as on a commercial project. We were very lucky that most of the artists were not booked on freelance projects. (more…)
In late December 2013, the progression is good. In addition to the work in progress, the Vector Hero & Villain are about to be fully completed in mapping and shading. Moreover, the animation is completed at 40%. Holding the delivery date around February/March seems still conceivable if production speed is steady.
But here is the big news : ultimately, the game release is scheduled for the last week of January 2014. This leaves us a month less than what we thought. It was obvious that it would be impossible to meet the deadline… But we were not demoralized ! (more…)
By the end of February 2014, as expected we missed the deadline. The game is released on Steam since one month (by the way the feedback of the press were very positive!). Nevertheless, the trailer took a good shot of boost since Christmas. Animation is nearly finished. Pilot Character is completed. Look of the film is determined. Shots assembly is progressing.
It is precisely during this momentum of productivity that we are almost all booked on various commercial projects for the next three-five months. (more…)
August 2014. Project Anniversary! It’s been a year since we started working on the trailer. As we discussed in the previous Story Article, progress has become quite complicated. But even if things are moving slowly, they are moving forward!
When is the new release date? Since we completely missed the game’s launch on Steam, our new deadline will be the announcement of the consoles version of the game: Strike Vector EX. At this point, we do not yet know when it will be but probably in early 2015. (more…)
February 2015. As you can see in the last edit, the trailer is near to be finished! It remains seven shots to complete and, of course, the sound and music to make. We were lucky to find two great partners to take care of this part of the work. TAPE Production for the sound design and The Maravers for the music.
Meanwhile, Ragequit asked us to edit a short teaser to communicate about the announcement of the console version of Strike Vector. (more…)
August 2015, the trailer is finished. FINISHED!!!
We spent the summer improving some shots, meanwhile Tape finalized the sound design and the music with the help of Maravers.
The trailer will be used to announce the release date of the console version of the game: Strike Vector EX but the development suffered some delays. In the end, the trailer was released in August 2016. Yes, one year after we finish it. In the end, we were not so late 😀 (more…)
After all this time, what are we doing now?
Mhamed and I, we left our CG Supervisor position and founded our own studio: Capsule Studio. We are in activity since less than a year but we already had the luck to work on great projects. For exemple, we just made several CGI cinematics and trailers for the Deck13’s game: The Surge. For our greatest happiness, we were able to work on this with a lot of people who helped us on Strike Vector! (more…)