Join the Rockband

Pete Candeland & Passion pictures have just released a new cinematic trailer for upcoming game Rockband, for which the few screengrabs above don’t nearly do justice. The piece features the gorgeous visuals Pete has made a name for himself with – see Gorillaz El Manana, Dare, etc.

Classic Deep Purple for audio, fantastic camera moves and animation (facial animation in particular, courtesy of facial motion capture) and a truly self-destructive theme, I really do want to buy a small plastic guitar and hang around in my living room pretending I’m Jimmy Page.

Watch it here.

Passion Pictures release follows:

“Production Co: Passion Pictures
Director: Pete Candeland
Storyboard/Design: Pete Candeland, Rob Valley, Nelson Yokota de Paula Lima
Producer: Anna Lord
Exec Producer: Hugo Sands
Animation + Post: (see attached list for full credits)
Software: Xsi, Modo, After FX v7, Final Cut Pro
Motion capture: Centroid
Lip sync mocap: Image Metrics
Music: “Highway Starâ€? Deep Purple

 

Passion Pictures has just completed a cinematic trailer for the opening of the highly anticipated music videogame Rock Band. Created by Harmonix, the leading developer of music based games, Rock Band is a new platform for music fans and gamers to interact with music like never before, challenging users to master the lead/bass guitar, drums and vocals as solo artists or cooperatively as part of their own band. Passion Pictures worked on the Rock Band cinematic with Ryan Lesser, Art Director, and one of the original game developersat Harmonix. To view the cinematic and learn more about Rock Band, visit www.rockband.com.

Directed by Pete Candeland and with music by legendary rock gods Deep Purple, the trailer pays tribute to the classic rock music video genre. The animated band thunders through the American desert landscape in a battered old car. The lead singer casually climbs onto the windscreen to give his performance and the rest of the band follow. As they progress toward rock stardom they are thrown onto their souped-up tour van. The van speeds up a narrow mountain road, they take a hairpin bend too fast and both band and van are catapulted into the air …

Executive producer Hugo Sands says, “We were delighted to be a creative partner with Ryan and Harmonix and work on the new Rock Band venture. We are finding more exciting new opportunities for our directors in games and online applications, and this is a good example.â€?

The fully CG film was animated in XSi by an international team at Passion. It was rendered in Mental Ray and composited in After FX. The characters were modelled with Modo. Passion collaborated with Image Metrics to provide facial motion capture data for the lead singer, which was a first for the Passion team.“