Activision reached out to Territory Studio to contribute to their newest game in the franchise, Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6.
Their request: to create over a dozen bespoke films that drive the single player narrative of the campaign with compelling and eye-catching visuals – our pitch focused on period specific design, old-school animation techniques and an emphasis on efficient, immersive storytelling.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cinematics
Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6
Read MoreIt’s the early 90’s: technology has become fast, easy and cheap. The World Wide Web was released to the public in 1991, permanently fusing the globe with dial-up ringtones and ASCII text. Early 90’s nostalgia becomes prevalent in nearly all entertainment: cinema, television, fashion, music – all take to new technological slipstreams, reaching new audiences at unthinkable scales.
Within this new world, our protagonists sit and scheme. Gone are the days when the full might of the US government has propped our team up with custom-made gadgets and international intel. But with every door that the life of an outcast closes, so with it opens the alleys of backroom access, analog freedom and wealth of opportunity that the age of the rogue agent presents.
Design Theme
Deconstruction
With this global lift-off, pop culture takes flight – birthing unique tones, textures and attitudes that attempt to rebel against this new digital world. Deconstructionism is born. The deconstructionist movement breaks the whole and recombines these elements to build a new order. The process of dismantling these structures creates a strong visual expression whilst imprinting a sense of disorder on the viewer.
This art form offered our team not only an excellent medium for creative, bold and eye-catching typography but amplified the tense and disconnected context of the story’s protagonists – as Woods and Adler also find themselves absent of any harmony, continuity, and symmetry.
Animation Theme
The Mind's Eye
The Black Ops series has always been about sourcing intel and discovering what’s real, all as a means to push forward the game’s immersive narrative.
In our view, the next step in its evolution was to make this intel come to life on the screen. We wanted to recreate the mental visualisation techniques that operatives use to create a better mental image of their upcoming mission.
The graphics are designed to transport the audience into the experienced and efficient lens of the operative.
We wanted each storybeat to feel human. From cartographical locations growing with volume as we fly through the landscape to dossier content restructuring around pivotal information to morphing photos into overlay information – each frame should bring the audience into the thought process of an operative: frantic, sporadic but progressive. We follow the journey as narrative is condensed into information and information into actions.
Asset Creation
Challenges often become the best element of projects – especially when the solution is creative.
Due to various constraints, we created everything you see in these films in-house – often, literally, by hand. Ink splotches. A plethora of scrawled scribbles. Crumpled black tape and fist-clamped marker-swipes. Hundreds of different textures, layers and tools were all scanned and then integrated into the tapestry timeline of every film’s animation. Not only did this give us a bespoke advantage of having hand-crafted assets but it also meant that every element of the graphics feels more human. These elements, when layered with cg, archive footage and gritty typography, would help ensure historical accuracy and expand upon the narrative beats for each film.
Animation & Cinematography
With the visual style established the animation needed to be energetic, creative and, above all, cinematic.
The framing would be bold, the cinematography dark and constantly on the move. Our objective was for the audience to be part of this graphic world and not just a passenger along for the ride. We therefore needed to be clever with the way the camera moved – creating beautiful frames that tell the story rather than just showing off without a good reason. It was important that we created a constant feeling of momentum that always drove the story forward. Lighting was a major factor in keeping the momentum moving between scenes. The way the light framed a composition would set the drama of the scene and also guide the viewer through the required narrative.
Final Word
Territory’s contribution to Black Ops 6 totalled as 1 x title sequence, 7 x pre-mission, 5 x safehouse and
3 x mid-mission which totalled up to over 14 minutes of bespoke animation for the cinematics.
None of this would have been possible without the team’s talent for storytelling, design and organisation
but also the trust and collaboration built between ourselves and the teams at both Raven Software & Treyarch – for which we can’t thank them enough.
Client's Quotes
| You guys have been great to collaborate with and produced fantastic work. It was amazing to see these come together over time. Thanks for contributing so much of your imagination and hard work to this game, it’s really making a big difference!
Murray Kraft |
Enjoy your success! Territory is amazing, thank you. Sharp and Professional, creative and all around great partners! Joe Koberstein |