when we decided to release a branch of French battleships the question arose
what would be the theme of our video there are many things that would relate
to France and they wouldn't want to use cliches the Eiffel Tower a cabaret
French pastoral landscapes famous French wines and so forth but then I remembered
that 10 years earlier I was travelling by car with my friends in the South of
France we were traveling from town to town and people everywhere despite their
age despite their social status we're throwing some iron balls trying to
hit some other iron balls
petanque is quite an unusual game a complicated game
it's a tactics based game like snooker unfortunately it's not so entertaining
to watch that's why we used different filming techniques
angle shots for example when the camera moves together with the objects and when
the objects move within a shot we had to think over many aspects and discuss them
with our CG team we defined several issues we needed to solve as it turned
out it wasn't easy to hit an iron ball with another one eventually we decided
to make some of these shots using computer graphics
the second issue was finding a way to place a camera low enough so we could
effectively show the balls from a low angle
another issue was that the hero was throwing the ball directly at the camera
in the shot breakdown we decided to make these shots using computer graphics as
well it's hard to imagine how such a quiet and peaceful game can relate to
our usual videos where ships fire and engage each other an action never stops
we got lucky one of our historical consultants
frequently visits France and likes this game a lot when I told him that we were
going to film a video about the dog he said the tunc is so awesome it's so cool
so we got an idea to combine them through some specific motion transitions
we thought about the dynamic joins between petanque and naval battle shots
beforehand and then we made quite dynamic graphic transitions from one
scene into another
perhaps the most memorable shot in the video is the underwater torpedo shot to
my mind this is probably one of the best shots we've ever made underwater it was
very interesting to work on the two stock shots of the French battleships we
tried to make a stormy sea
water splashing onto the ships and flowing down from the ship step
while you're fishing no it's 90 other a flying shell somewhat resembles a flying
metal ball they both have the same task to kick the enemy out of the game