The Mill Aids
EA’s Need for Speed

27th May 2005 - The Mill New York has recently embarked on a massive new type of project with the creation of a high-profile game preview at E3 – the world’s largest gaming event. The preview was for EA’s “Need for Speed – Most Wanted” its highly-anticipated game and was projected onto a 360 degree screen throughout the 3 day show to over 100,000 gamers

This exciting and challenging project for the Mill involved creating a 10053 x 720 (9 x HD) 60fps fully CGI animated 50-second spot in only 7 weeks. As the upcoming computer games are created in HD resolution it was important to EA and Arnson Communications for the 360 degree animation to be projected at the resolution of the game.

The project would have been ambitious enough at standard video resolution, with a high speed car chase in an industrial cityscape, complete with countless car crashes, jack knifing 18 wheelers, hundreds of secondary traffic vehicles and roadblocks to ram through. The fact that every frame had to be 10.000 pixels across and the whole piece played back at 60 frames per second in a totally immersive environment elevated it to a whole new level of complexity. It was a great challenge for every section of the production pipeline and the team was very eager to take it on.

With a project of this magnitude Mill NY achieved the brief with Aron and Asher carefully sectioning the project into its core components and budgeting time and resources for each part from a detailed storyboard created by Craig Tozzi (Director). Using the storyboard and hands on direction from Craig, who relocated from L.A. to New York for most of the project, the team pre-visualized the animation in a wire-frame. Refining of the pre-viz carried on right up to a week before the delivery.

Once the shots were approved the Mill replaced the wire frame with the textured world and objects. To create the live-action style dynamics for the cars as well as the physics of the environment they were driving through the Mill team had to build a functioning rig for the cars, with individual suspension, body roll, wheel spin and brakes. The physics in the environment were solved using rigid body dynamics, an advanced physics simulation engine in XSI. The next step was to light/ render the shots. After the shots are off the render farm they were sent to Michael (shake artist) to be graded and to have particles added (smoke, paper, sparks).

Product - E3 Promotion for Electronic Arts / Title - Need for Speed – Most Wanted / Client/Agency - Arnson Communications, Inc. / Executive Producer - Todd Arnson / VFX Supervisor/ Technical Liaison - Kathy Siegel / Writer - Aaron Sternlicht / Writer - Neil Ingram / Production Company - Two Thousand Strong, Inc. / Director - Craig Tozzi / Producer - Maureen Hendricks / Post Production - The Mill / Lead Artist/Technical Director - Aron Hjartarson / Producer - Melanie Wickham / CG Producer - Asher Edwards / Animators - Aron Hjartarson, Dadi Einarsson, Joshua Merk, Yann Mabille, Andres Eguiguren / Modelling Team - Douglas Luka, Wyatt Savarese, Sam Kim, Arlene Persaud / Render Team - Arlene Persaud (Lead), Yann Mabille, Wyatt Savarese, Douglas Luka, Andres Eguiguren / Atmospherics/Effects - Oscar Gonzalez / Physics Simulation - Sam Kim / Avid Editing - Sam Kim / Programming Team - Dave Levy, Rick Walia / Digital Matte Painter - David Gibbon / Lead Shake Compositer - Michael Harrison

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