Hi. My name is Ben Dai.
I'm the director for our latest Overwatch short, Shooting Star.
And hello. I am Jake Patton, the editor for the short.
From the beginning, when we were conceiving the story,
Jeff Kaplan came to us
and wanted us to tell the story of D.Va
that no one else knows about.
It's the other side of D.Va that only a few people know.
We spent a lot of time,
because she's one of the most well-known characters from the game.
She has a very distinct attitude
and behavior in the game, and we wanted to preserve that,
but we were trying to show a side of her
that wasn't front and center to the public eye.
I think that was probably the hardest thing to do,
to find the right balance
between D.Va's casual attitude
versus her public image.
Absolutely. I think a lot of it came from the actress as well.
She spent a lot of time doing game lines,
so she had this very unique sound to D.Va
when we were playing her.
But then we asked her to take it down a notch,
and then maybe, actually, you know,
play her as a normal person a little bit more.
She actually pulled it off really well, because she just went in
and started to really relate to the character, who she is as a real...
You know, it's a real girl.
The flashback scene,
for me, it really works as a peek
at what D.Va is carrying on her shoulders
as the hero of Busan,
and as the main character for our piece.
And this conversation with Dae-hyun
that she's exposing what that feels like
and what she feels like she's going through,
he's trying to be her friend and really take some of that burden.
But she's a little standoffish.
And then we get this line from Dae-hyun that sort of sums up the whole show.
It's like, "Don't be afraid to ask for help."
And, you know, it's a good life lesson in general,
but for D.Va that's hard to do.
Yeah, I mean, the idea that you can't do it alone,
and sometimes even the best soldier needs help.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, that's the premise of the whole film, you know.
Something that really resonated with me when I was growing up is watching anime
and seeing some of those flying missiles
streaking across the sky,
and I really want to recreate that feeling.
Watching some of the movies growing up in the '80s
with airplane dogfights and stuff inspired
some of these aerial-combat sequences.
During production,
we have a stage after storyboard called previz,
and one of our previz leads, Don Ta,
he actually took it upon himself
to choreograph the sequence,
cutting footage from live action and anime,
animation from different movies.
Just did this collage of imagery
that pretty much dictated the whole aerial-combat sequence.
Yeah, it helped a lot. It was awesome.
We were able to get a lot of ideas
from how things would move through.
And the speed at which you can cut an air-combat scene is interesting,
because there's not much to show.
It's the vehicles and then the interiors.
And we're over water, so it's even simpler.
But that really helped me,
as far as helping to find the right feel
for the pacing of the action,
and still have our moments where we can stop down and have moments like this,
where they're having a conversation,
but you're still feeling the action, feeling that there is jeopardy and danger.
It was great that he did that.
From that edit,
we actually created the 3D animatic,
what we call the previz edit.
During that time, there was a big debate
on how we would actually do the aerial-combat sequence in real 3D.
Shall we cheat every single shot
so that they're not moving an actual distance,
or should we actually do it the correct way?
We ended up doing it pretty much the correct way,
except a few shots that we cheated.
In order to do that,
we have to come up with the actual distance
from where the omnic shows up to the Busan city,
and then the MEKA base,
which is situated right in the middle,
and how they interact with each other
in relation to the base and the city.
You can see in the sequence
that we tried to make sure that every single shot,
when flying towards the city we see the city in the background,
and we situate the base where it's supposed to be so that you get...
Even though it's a really simple location situation,
it's very easy for the audience, and for us, to get lost,
and forget which side we're facing.
And also the moon plays a huge role,
because this entire show is lit,
technically, by one giant light source: the moon.
It is practical.
So the punch and the pistol moment,
when we were storyboarding these sequences,
where the artists came up with these ideas,
it was really fun.
At first I thought it was a little too much,
but we kept it in there and everyone liked it.
People fell in love with that sequence,
so it made it all the way to the end.
There's some debate around if she should use her gun while driving her mech.
What's the physicality of it?
Is it even possible to stick her hand out?
But at the end, I thought we executed it pretty nicely.
We took great care in preserving everything from the game.
The models are pretty much 1:1 to the game models,
with higher resolution.
The sound... Our sound engineer did a really good job
incorporating game sounds,
and jazzing it up
so that it feels like it belongs in the environment.
When we mixed it, we really made sure
that all these game sounds showed through
so that we can actually hear it with all the other background noises.
There's a lot of animation detail paid attention to for D.Va,
because we have so many close-ups of her face.
A lot of time went into the fine details
to make her face look on-model with the game,
with a little extra for cinematic needs.
And especially in scenes at the end
where she's on the mech, and we get her long hair.
Yeah, absolutely.
She actually went through different variations of her outfit.
When she started she had the hat on, with her jacket, and her suit underneath.
In her flashback sequence, she had her makeup.
So, basically, she had the normal D.Va look in the game.
But in our short,
we felt like it's weird that she would have makeup,
so we removed that, then put her hair in a ponytail
so it's more of a casual look,
because the omnics caught her off-guard.
Then, at the very end, we have another version without the hat,
her hair is down.
So there's a lot of work going into making her look natural.
Thank you very much for spending 7 and a half minutes with us,
and we'll see you next time.