Grey Goo

We collaborated with Axis Animation to help tell the story of Grey Goo - the Emergence Campaign. We created a total of 4 in-game cinematics for the real-time-strategy video game that played before each mission. The term Grey Goo, in essence, refers to a hypothetical end-of-world scenario involving the continual replication of nanotechnology at a molecular level. The scenes we worked on primarily took place inside the goo world.

The concept behind the style development was to create a world that would feel like we are essentially trapped in a digital river - a technologically evolved liquid environment. The animation therefore needed to feel like we are essentially travelling, or floating, through water. This meant a lot of deliberately slow, drawn-out movements, long camera shots and the slow replication of water physics, which were subsequently applied to various atmospheric particle systems. As the entire story takes place from a molecular-level perspective, it was also important that realistic camera properties were taken into consideration, such as shallow depth of field, camera speed and movement noise.

Ultimately we created 4 cinematics for a total duration of 6 minutes.