In the summer of 2017, I was called upon to help spearhead the Post Production and Visual Design for a series of BlizzCon Virtual Ticket features produced by Player Studios.
A sample of the final motion titles for the following projects: “The Artist’s Journey,” “Advanced Cosplay,” and the “Year in Review” slates for all Blizzard IPs.
I went through a few different concepts before the producers landed on the final approval. We started working with the Overwatch IP as that was the first segment to be shot. The "Developer Insights" title was abandoned for "Year in Review" mid-production.
The final "Year In Review" for Heroes of the Storm as shown on the official HotS Channel. Capturing the game footage for this was incredibly rewarding since I'm pretty darn good at the game and could showcase some of the exact strategies and features discussed in the footage. ("MenthaAG3" is my battle tag!)
The final projects look something like this. My roles in this project were Assembly Editing, Motion Graphics, Color Correction, Game Footage capture, preliminary sound mixing, and final output. As the primary editor on these projects, my role was to use my extensive knowledge of each IP to pick out the highlights of each interview and focus on the content that other players would find interesting.
For Hearthstone, I looged into the producer's account (since he had a LOT of Hearthstone cards) to replicate key features brought up in the interviews.
Capturing the game footage was something I hadn't done before, but I quickly sorted out how to get the highest resolution possible without a cumbersome capture card using built in features from Windows 10. My editing rig is built for multi cam editing with 4K footage, so we could crank the graphics up to their maximum setting to preserve the integrity and frame rate of all game footage.
During my play sessions, I did tailor situations in game to illustrate the specific points that were being brought up in the on-camera interviews. This ensured good narrative flow and gave me the freedom as an editor to "show" the audience what the developers were talking about.
“The Artist’s Journey” came together pretty quickly. The director had a very clear vision in mind and we had the most visual freedom on this segment. The only goal was to be elegant, simple, and evoke all of the artistry that goes into Blizzard Entertainment’s games.
There was also one additional segment I created designs for: "Casual Cosplay" which started out as Cosplay Corner. This was another set that started off very much in the Blizzard look, but landed on something very different after a few rounds of feedback from the client.
My initial concepts for the "Cosplay Corner" titles.
After a few rounds, the general layout went unchanged, but the typography and branding was shifted to match the rest of the broadcast package on the BlizzCon Virtual Ticket.
This was definitely a hard two months of work, but the end results were well worth it and the crew was fantastic. Blizzard has always been at the top of my list of clients to work for, so this job was a wonderful opportunity to let me play in their world!
