GDC 2008: Blizzard on the inspirations for StarCraft 2 cinematics

A cinematic creative director’s job may be sound or look like fun, but it isn’t necessarily easy. Just ask Blizzard Cinematic Creative Director”>Nick Carpenter, who oversaw the production of the cinematics for Blizzard’s StarCraft 2.

The creative process of making Zeratul, Kerrigan, and Tichus looking the way they do took a lot of work, as Carpenter will tell you after the jump.

It may not be totally off-kilter to think of Cinematic Creative Director Blizzard Cinematic Creative Director”>Nick Carpenter‘s work as a labor of love. After all, a lot of time and effort went into the cinematics of Blizzard’s anticipated Pc game StarCraft 2.

At the Game Developers Conference 2008, Carpenter himself said that “we made the tech guys’ lives a nightmare.” Nightmare or not, the attention to detail shows.

In the case of the StarCraft 2 teaser involving Tichus Findlay, Carpenter and his team visited and photographed an industrial plant for visual inspiration. They took note of the nitty-gritty details, such as the way light filtered through metal shafts and reflected against chipped coats of paint.

As Carpenter put it: “Every object tells a story.” Carpenter and company also drew from other sources of inspiration. Zeratul, for instance, was a hybrid of features borrowed from Bruce Lee and Egyptian influences.

For Kerrigan, Carpenter wanted her to look creepy in a Zergy sort of way, so he designed her bone wings in such a way that she could spread them out underneath her and use them as spider’s legs.

As meticulous as Carpenter and his team were with the details, even he admitted that some things ended up on Blizzard’s cutting room floor: “We spent all this time making Kerrigan a nice pretty spine, and we wound up covering it with all her hair.”