Project: Dante's Inferno
Client Company: Electronic Arts

Agency: G-Net, Los Angeles
Executive Producers: David Getson, David Moodie, John Rosenberg
Creative Director: David Moodie
Writer: David Moodie
Original Score: Garry Schyman
Sound Design: Paul Gorman, David Swenson
Additional Titles: Devan Simunovich
Production Supervisor: Shelby Hill
Media Editor: Alik Griffin

Production Company: Psyop, New York
Director: Psyop
Psyop Creative Director: Eben Mears
Executive Producer: Lucia Grillo
Producer: Carol Collins
Design Director: Jon Saunders
Designer: Anh Vu
Storyboard Artist: Ben Chan
3D Look and Development: Marco Iozzi
Matte Painter: Pete Sickbert-Bennett
Technical Directors: Tony Barbieri, Damon Ciarelli, Miguel A. Salek (FX), Lee Wolland (Character & Rigging)
3D Team: Helen Choi, Tom Cushwa, Pete Devlin, Rei Ito, Kitty Lin, Consuelo Macri, Rich Magan, Pat Porter, Heiko Schneck, Miles Southan, Gooshun Wang, Russ Wooton
Compositing: Molly Schwartz, Jason Conradt, Fred Kim


Notes on "Dante's Inferno" from Psyop:

Here at Psyop we aren’t known for doing animations on the darker side, in fact there was some question if we were even capable of this degree of violence when we first pitched on the job. We took this as a bit of a challenge and dug deep into our inner 13 year old boy to channel necessary violence and gore to create this spot. The experience of making this trailer was both exciting and challenging. Geeks being geeks we wanted to cram as much cool content into this trailer as possible, which led to this animation becoming one of Psyop’s most dense cg projects to date. The team spent incredibly long hours working on this in the few months that we had problem solving and trying to exceed our own expectations. In the end it was a bit of a slave labor of love, but with out a doubt worth it.

We worked very closely with EA in order to match what they had created for game content. They sent us some models, environment designs and character designs, but in the end we could only use these as reference due to our animation needs, forcing us to recreate everything ourselves into high quality models and matte paintings. This was an enormous amount of work but gave us the opportunity to add our own touch to what we received from EA. I think one of our biggest references was the artwork of Wayne Barlowe which turned out to work very seamlessly with what EA had in mind since they brought him in to help with their character designs.

Overall spot length is always one of the biggest challenges in the commercial animation. This project was the complete opposite of that. We had no time restriction from G-Net so for us it became a matter of limiting ourselves and not make this animation so long that we couldn’t complete it! What this difference in limits allowed was more of a focus on dramatic pacing, which is very difficult to achieve in a 30 second spot. In certain scenes we are able to linger a bit longer to give the scene the appropriate mood.

From design phase to final delivery we had three months to create this animation. Our production schedule became very tight so we had to be smart with how we budgeted our time and resources.

For the bulk of our production we used Maya and for our particle sims we used 3ds Max and Houdini. All of our compositing was done in After Effects.

Like any project that you sweat and bleed over for 3 months you feel a mix of emotions. Excited that we were able to create it, in some ways glad that it’s done due to sheer exhaustion and wishful for just another week to fix the things we only see! In the end we are just happy that we had this opportunity to pursue something that is a bit different from our usual look and we hope to tackle more projects like this in the future.