Chaos End Cinematic Commentary


The Chaos End Cinematic is a favorite amongst many in-house at Iron Lore Entertainment, including myself. It tells an interesting story and I got to shoot some interesting scenes. The Chaos are synonymous with ‘Bloodlust’, which is what I tried to portray in this video. That and religious fanaticism. This was the next to last end cinematic I did of the seven.

Part 1


Scene 1
By this time, I’ve gotten pretty good with having rows of soldiers. What’s interesting here is that I needed one soldier to break off and let his curiosity lead him to an ominous mansion. The rest of the soldiers must not recognize he’s left. I had to put him on a different path that lined up with the original path of the other soldiers. I have him hesitate a few times before he enters the building for dramatic effect. Obviously, he’s been tempted by the Chaos before and he’s finally been mentally broken down enough to leave his squad and investigate this house.

Scene 2
This is the second time I opted to have a scene inside of a building, which the Dawn of War engine isn’t built for. It takes a lot of changes to get the lighting right and you have to get the camera beyond the walls to see what your doing. But I felt having a religious cult of civilians in some kind of demented sanctuary was necessary. I made the lighting purple because it was so bizarre and helped the transformation from outside to inside. I used a specific animation of the soldier to show that he completely loses his mind at this time. However, the end of the animation has him rise and slam down into the ground, which wouldn’t fit. I had to fade out before it got to that part of the animation.

Scene 3
My instructions for the next scene were, “the grand ceremony, have cultists and guardsmen die as the warpstorm is created.” In the end, we decided not to kill the cultists who were performing the ceremony. I twisted the camera here for extra chaotic effect. I built this entire set with any in-game art I could found. I built this set on the edge of a map and had the camera come from off the playable area. However, the unplayable area creates a shadow, but I decided it wasn’t detrimental to the video. I used some pretty interesting, flashy objects and buried them in the ground to produce the sacrificial center area.

Getting the guys on the stairs was the difficult part, because the stairs don’t have any physical matter. The cultists would just sink to the ground below. I had to raise the ground to just below each step. The cultists feet were actually cut off, but you can’t tell.

I first did some in-game fade to red for the effect of the warpstorm creation. I ended up choosing an effect through the video editing software I was using. This causes the red to bleed into the letterbox. I decided this goes along with the illustration of bloodlust I was trying to create. ;)

Part 2


Scene 1 and 2
The next two scenes were probably the easiest two scenes of all my work and they turned out quite well! They were easy because there’s no script. I just made two scenes and put a lot of dead bodies and painted the ground red. I chose a river scene so I could make the water blood red. I put a Chaos star on the hill along with some purple fire as if they were saying “Chaos was here.” All I had to do then was set the camera path.

Interesting tidbit here, I was listening to Smashing Pumpkins when I recorded this part of the video. I was trying to record this fast and check it off my list, so I forgot that music would get recorded along with it. I had a good laugh with the sound guy and he took out. However, a week or two before my contract ended, I could here the nasally voice of the lead singer barely in the background. It was only for a moment. I told the sound guy and he switched the mixers around and we found the song to still be there! It would have been fun to have left it there as an egg, but the producer said no. J Probably for legal reasons, haha.

Part 3


Scene 1
This last part was the hardest of the entire cinematic, mainly because it was all one long scene. My task was to create a world that was populated and controlled by Chaos. Now, they’re not very civilized, so the entire scene had to be disturbing. I had a Bloodthirster walking around and I found every twisted object I could find. Then I hung humans on them. There were skull statues and the sky itself was very demented. The purplish effects coming off the building helped too.

The final section of the scene was very fun to make. I piled up bodies, got to paint the ground red, through flashy effects every where, had epic pillars with slaves tortured in the top cells and a floating demon head from the original dawn of war game. It was truly Chaos. Getting the Chaos Lord to stand on the platform was rather difficult (because the units always sink to the ground below!). Also, I recorded the scene several times, waiting for him to turn and show his face to the camera. The default animation has him do a different set of things; I didn’t just have an animation to have him turn to the right, so I had to wait for him to behave. Unfortunately, they changed the art for his face near the end of the project and I had to do it over again.

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