This segment shows the development of Sleepwalker|Media’s member’s pre-visualization of a real-time cinematic “Wow Moment” for Midway Games’ prototype, Gunrunner.  The segment first shows the animated storyboards of the moment, followed by a 3D animatic developed from those storyboards.

The Wow Moment bridges two gameplay segments.  In the first, the player's vehicle chases a fleeing van.  The vehicles cross through a city intersection at high speed, causing a chain reaction of accidents.  A car carrier, trying to avoid the accidents, rolls over, throwing it's vehicle payload at the player, who must destroy it in the second gameplay segment.

From this rough outline and the game team’s direction that the Wow Moment’s cinematography should emulate the approach of the Bourne films, Sleepwalker members went to work.  They fleshed out all of the on-screen action: blocking out the vehicle flow, traffic accidents, and near misses necessary to create a high-octane action sequence.  Storyboards were then prepared, so that the game team could advise on how the prototype’s resources and technical limitations would affect implementation.  A few shots had either be revised or removed in order to accommodate these limitations.

After this consultation, Sleepwalker members created a 3D animatic. They reviewed in detail the action and shot timing, lens selection, harmonizing them with the intended game location for the scene. Creation of the animatic revealed the need to rearrange the location's layout to accommodate the scene's action and the desired cinematography. The animatic also revealed to the game team that it needed to greatly enhance their engine's motion blur and depth-of-field solutions to support the Bourne-style cinematography.