Call of Duty: Warzone

A socially distanced, remotely visualised, pandemic shoot.

During the pandemic I was part of a small team that brought a fully socially distanced shoot for Call of Duty’s upcoming DLC for their popular franchise. The idea was to place an actor in a completely CG generated space, setup and execute the shoot remotely.

The main task was to find a suitable camera placement for the cockpit, alter the design so not to resemble any genuine aircraft. I produced a series of line-ups. I added quick lighting and shadowing ideas to see how we could better sell that the aircraft was really in motion.

The techvis was super important to getting the actor in the right place, making sure that the green screen filled the frame and to guarantee that the camera placement would provide the right angle for the CG background.

During the Pre-Light, I was sent some of the Creative Directors screen grabs and I quickly added them into the visualisation scene to check that everything was lining up and the scale was working.

I also started to experiment with how the warning lights would react within the cockpit. I began fleshing out extra props like sunglasses dangling and clouds to show the speed of the aircraft, it was all to inform the discussion.

Once the visualisation had been more or less wrapped I was asked by the Supervisory team to see what I could do to make the cockpit feel more alive. I’ve built many simulation rigs in the past, so I quickly modelled or repurposed areas of the model that could work and ran my cfx rig process. The idea was to add vibration or sway without having to keyframe anything.

Additional to the wire and chain simulations, I had to correctly work out the rotations of the propellers to seamlessly loop. To add some very subtle motion, I also created some wing flex and window vibration.