Platage Image is a Poland-based high-quality animation studio. Today they have shared details of their recent work for a promotional/introductory video for the forthcoming Xbox 360 video game ‘The Witcher 2‘. To accompany this release they have produced a detailed visualisation which captures the hard work and complexity of the challenge faced by their artists, designers and coders in producing this rich 4 minute video project – the product of nine months’ work.
The main visualisation element displays the dozens of tasks performed concurrently by a team of over 50 people, from animation, rendering and composition through to FX, scene set-up and lighting.
Each concentric track displays a key quantitative measure to highlight the substantial volume of intricate work that goes into each element.
It starts with the animatic, the structure of which dictates the scenes and shots that comprise the film. Each shot, in turn, has been organized by characters and layers, as well as the time and gigabytes of data used in its creation. The information is arranged in a structured hierarchy with marked parent and child categories. This layout makes it possible to compare and explore information at different levels of depth.
Towards the bottom of the piece, which you can access by visiting the main site and clicking on ‘download poster’, you get a network diagram showing the relationship between the actors/characters in the video as well as a radial calendar of the project as a timeline.
It is quite a lot to digest in one go but as you spend time reading each layer you really appreciate the amount of effort and the different layers of design activity taking place, even for just a short 4 minute video. For more information about this project visit www.thewitcher.com/visualdata. The final video is available to watch below: