Cinematics

Night At The Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

When Pipeworks needed roughly thirty minutes of cinematics for their upcoming game based on the blockbuster film: A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, they were immediately faced with a few issues. One being that a big Hollywood CG house would cost more than their whole development budget. Also, the cutscenes needed to match the game as close as possible, which would require a studio to spend time with the game and get to know the lighting and art style of each level. This would not be accomplished with a studio that specializes in million dollar car commercials. Finally, the actor’s dialogue would not be recorded till halfway through the project, which would leave the animators hanging when it came to lip syncing.

Our pipeline is built to create high end cinematics on an independent game developer’s budget.

The answer to their problems was just a few hours north in Portland, Oregon. Our studio was built to create high end cinematics on an independent game developer’s budget. We were able to deliver exactly what they needed with a budget that made sense to their project. Also, since games are everything and all we do, we had no problem playing buggy builds, working with an engine and thumbing through all the assets till we had a full grasp of the project. Voice over and audio issues were also an easy fix. We have a fully equipped, professional audio studio and are networked with some of the best voice actors in the business. Although in this case we just let the team read, which gave them plenty of scratch tracks to hold them over till Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson could pencil us in.