Imperial Guard End Cinematic Commentary


The IG End Cinematic is the first video I did of the seven. Being the first, I still had a lot to learn about the tools, even though I had been working on scenes that were run in-game. Here, I had the flexibility of creating my own sets unlike the scenes in-game. I really had a chance to show creativity combined with my technical skills, which is precisely why I love this industry so much. Before this project, I worked on databases for a food chain and I had no room to be creative.

One word to describe the Imperial Guard is “militaristic”. Thus, I wanted that to be the one word used to describe my video. I wanted marching troops, executing commands with precision and generals standing proud. There were several challenges in doing this with my understanding of the tools at this point.

Part 1


Scene 1
The first scene shows the final remnants of battle against the Chaotic forces under the Warpstorm sky. There are a lot of dead heretics and cultists laying around from the long battle. There’s then a set of troops running to cover the next area. It took many camera shots of this scene before I thought it was satisfactory. I still don’t think it is as fantastic as I wanted it to be. Not until the last month did we realize the numbers on their shoulders were wrong and I had to record one last time to fix the issue.

I added this little part to the scene (it wasn’t part of the instructions). Since the IG were in the process of cleaning up the remaining Chaos forces, I thought back to war movies and what they typically did. I made a little crater the IG were using for the dead bodies. I then stood a row of cultists in a line and had Kasrkins (an elite IG squadron) execute them on command. A lot of coworkers mentioned loving this scene. There was some debate on which direction the cultists should be facing. My argument was respected members get executed facing you, while non-respected entities should be shot in the back. I made that up, but it sure seems to make sense. :)

Part 2


Scene 1
This scene is intended to show the bustling activity of the Imperial troops as they rebuild their presence on the Kaurava system. This set is directly from the Imperial map. Unfortunately, since I copied this set, the map had many detail upgrades. I couldn’t recopy the set due to tool limitations, so I had to redo the details myself. In the end, I think I matched it up decently. Having buildings be in their construction phase took a while to learn. The corresponding script commands didn’t do what one would expect. Eventually I wrote my own function that made my life a lot easier. I also made a function which forced a building into a location no matter what else was there, which was beneficial to me and some other employees. :)

Don’t get me started on what is involved to rotate a building…

Scene 2
I had no instructions for this scene and I decided to add it after I finished the video because I didn’t think it had enough scenes. I used one part of the map to create the warpstorm view and another part to create the night sky city scene. This required me to use the same rotational settings on the camera so the skyboxes matched up. I then blended them together using video editing to visually show how the world changed. It was also fun to make the night city.

Scene 3
This scene changed a lot from its original concept. I originally had a distant camera descend upon this wasteland crater, had some ships fly by and then Necron Flayed Ones came out. Many people didn’t understand and wondered why Necron were coming back during the IG victory movie. Eventually I did this scene which shows the Necron are still there, but there not quite functioning yet. I suppose they’ll want revenge on both the Eldar and the humans now. The animation the Necron does is used for a single dying warrior in the background during the intro video to the second expansion, Dark Crusade.

Part 3


Scene 1
This scene was monumental in my progress at Iron Lore. Here, I was determined to have troops run in straight in straight rows. I say straight twice because that was not easy! When the troops ran, they’d wobble around and it looked rather sluggish. I had to dig deep into the tools, far beyond what I was trained on, to figure out how to do this. When I finally accomplished a method that worked, I had learned so much more of what I could do and I applied it accordingly to different sections of my work. At this point, I was even able to help others who couldn’t figure out how to do certain scripting. I also learned more about Lua to figure out how to make the crowd in the background dynamically walk towards the parading troops.

Scene 2
This final image was simply to portray General Stubbs resemblance to the statue of the emperor, a shining beacon of military might. Also, he stands proudly and enjoys his victory over the Kaurava system, bringing respect back to the Imperial Guards who had failed to maintain the system.

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