The Witcher 2: The Making of the “52 and a Half” Video, Part Two

For the second and final installment of their making of blog for the “52 and a Half” The Witcher 2 trailer, the folks at CD Projekt walk us through the actual production of the video, with all the challenges that come with it. Here’s an excerpt:

The cavalry rides in to save the day!

In Sapkowski’s stories Geralt often talks to his horse Roach (the Witcher had a lot of horses, but he would always give them the same name Roach). Why not use this motif in our movie? To implement this idea we (stole) one of the story team members. Arek Borowik prepared the final monologue and now we knew we just had to record Doug Cockle (the English voice of Geralt). But how could we put all these new ideas into the clip? This time the solution was simple. The clip had to be longer.

Short story long

(The horse monologue) worked fine. It appealed to the viewer, because it didn’t tell the story directly and would be consistent with The Witcher’s universe.

In the meantime we organised a motion capture recording and started to create the movie in-engine using our motion builder. The sequences were growing by the day and we achieved the proper pacing for telling the entire story.

The film was getting longer and longer. Geralt’s journey, the troll encounter, the horse panicking, meditation and the cave sequence all of this added up to a length of over 5 minutes. Our initial concept was only two minutes long. But the story as a whole was great, so we didn’t want to cut a thing.