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Ever wonder if Darth Maul could sing? Is Boba Fett a better bounty hunter or bassist? Thanks to those two extra arms, could General Grievous reach Keith Moon status as a drummer? This Friday, Oct. 28, tune into MTV2 to see your favorite Star Wars characters in full rock star mode on "Video Mods."
By mixing some of today's most popular video games and characters with the latest music videos and artists, each episode of "Video Mods" represents a breakthrough in entertainment by providing an entirely new experience for music and video game fans alike, produced by the animation studio IBC Digital in Buffalo, NY.
As previously reported in June, fans were treated to Franz Ferdinand's hit song "Take Me Out" reconstructed using characters from the Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith video game featuring Obi-Wan and Mace Windu on guitar, Yoda on drums and Anakin taking lead vocals.
For this episode of this season's "Video Mods", the alternative rockers Foo Fighters' hit "DOA" showcases the hidden musical talents of Star Wars Battlefront II video game characters featuring Darth Vader on guitar, Boba Fett on bass, General Grievous on drums and Darth Maul taking lead vocals and guitar.
"Unlike the first mod we did which had Anakin going to the dark side and transforming into Darth Vader, this mod is more about capturing the energy and attitude of some of the most memorable characters from all six films," says IBC Digital Inc. president Ben Porcari, who co-directed the new mod. "We place these characters in a brand new setting, playing together in abandoned Imperial hangar in the depths of space. Obviously many of these characters are from different eras in Star Wars saga, but they fit well and look cool together!"
Using a Foo Fighters' song as the soundtrack to the Battlefront II mod made perfect sense to everyone involved in the project.
"Battlefront II is all about action and combat," Porcari explains. "You live the greatest adventure of all time, fighting battles in space, on ships and across the galaxy. The main idea here is war is hell. The Foo Fighters song "DOA" takes up the same theme -- the hardships of war and not knowing if you are going to get out alive. The energy of the song is high and that is a perfect match for both Battlefront II's aggressive action and for Darth Maul's intense attitude. Plus we heard that lead singer Dave Grohl was big Star Wars fan, and that definitely gave us extra incentive to get the deal signed."
Making a video mod of this caliber isn't easy. In fact, the same process IBC Digital uses to create a video mod often parallels the same tasks done by artists, animatics teams and special effects animators in the Star Wars films themselves.
"Making mods is a challenging process that takes several weeks and a variety of different artists to complete," Porcari says. "We start out with the concept, and try to get the best match of games and song. We look for a good synergy that will get fans of both the game and the artist excited."
After a choice is made and the team finalizes a concept IBC Digital moves forward to create storyboards and pre-visualization of each mod and do the motion capture.
"Motion capture is a technology where an actor wears markers all over their body and performs a given part," Porcari explains. "The actors' motions are reverse engineered by a computer and then applied to an animated character. That's a bit of simplification of the process, but you get the idea. Motion capture is often used when you need a lot of animation in a short time."
In addition to this process, IBC Digital also develops the storyboards, animatics and pre-visualizations for each sequence in the song. These edited together create a rough cut of the video. After the approval of the rough cut, IBC moves on to final animation. The motion captured data is applied to the characters, and various environments are built. However, if certain scenes cannot be done with motion capture the team must hand-animate the content. The mod is then put together shot-by-shot to match the rough cut.
"Once all the scenes are setup, the files move to lighting and effects to get everything ready for the final rendering," Porcari explains. "Because of the quality of the finished renders for 'Video Mods,' we use a supercomputer to do all the final calculations. For the show we use a 2,000-processor system at the Center for Computation Research (CCR) at the University of Buffalo. The rendering software reads in a scene file and calculates each frame of video. The more complex the lighting and rendering, the longer rendering takes. The first Star Wars mod required 30,000 hours of rendering!"
"Without the supercomputer at CCR it would have been pretty hard to do in-house," Porcari continues. "It's a 15-minute drive from our studio in downtown Buffalo so during the last few days of production there is a steady flow of hard drives back and forth."
After IBC receives the final image files, they proceed to composite, where all of the shot elements are composed, images are tweaked for color, and depth of field, film grain, and any special effects are added. As each scene is finished, it is sent to the editorial team where each video is conformed and the final master created. Of course, not all scenes made it to the final master.
"The scene of Boba Fett shooting a flamethrower from the end of his guitar unfortunately didn't make it," Porcari reveals.
Needless to say, the final cut of the Foo Fighters/Battlefront mod will not let down Star Wars fans and gamers alike.
"The sight of Darth Maul rocking the guitar under the hot lights will make any Star Wars fan excited -- myself included," Porcari confesses. "The close ups of Darth Maul with the red light streaming up from below, and his horns glowing from the lights above are intense. And Darth Maul has an amazing attitude during the song. You could easily imagine him really singing it. I also love the last shot where Grievous leaps up unto his drums and reveals that those drumsticks were actually lightsabers all along!"
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