Soul Calibur II TV Spot

Nov 13, 2005

San Diego based Pendulum recently completed a :30 international commercial spot for Soul Calibur III. The much anticipated title is the next installment for game developer NAMCO's celebrated fighting game series. Working with Los Angeles based advertising agency, The Ant Farm, Pendulum helped to create a spot that highlighted the game's unique character customization features., which allow players to build personalized characters with which to do battle.

The Ant Farm and NAMCO wished to capitalize on the player's new ability to "forge" their own characters. This grew into the idea of the Blacksmith, who the viewer sees pulling a molten piece of steel from a blazing hearth, beginning the process of forging a magical sword. With each crash of his hammer the evolving blade emits a torrent of fiery and magical sparks which are a catalyst for the explosive genesis of a different warrior from within each preceding character. The Blacksmith's body sears away and the resulting smoky cloud reveals the game's deadly Dancer, who we then see transition into a fearsome Barbarian, followed by another explosive transition revealing the game's menacing but beautiful Ninja, who's blistering sparks expose the series' sinister and familiar Knight. The Knight raises the newly forged and gleaming blade into the air as the ominous screams of all the warriors of Soul Calibur are heard.

Pendulum was responsible for 100% of CGI production. The project was executed primarily with the studio's core toolset; Alias Maya, Pixologic Zbrush, Syflex Cloth Simulator, Shave & Haircut, the mental ray rendering engine, and Adobe After Effects. Other critical fx's were created with wondertouch's particleIllusion and a some proprietary fx solutions to round out the pipeline. The fully-3D cinematic sequence was also fully storyboarded, built, animated and composited by Pendulum. While motion-capture was considered for the extremely realistic motion that the client wanted, Pendulum chose traditional key-frame animation to bring the characters to life. And of course, , the spot exhibits some exciting in-game footage, edited by The Ant Farm, who was responsible for all audio and editing post-production.

Pendulum's Michael McCormick served as the Director of Animation and 3D Lead with Robert Taylor as the Senior Compositor and Executive Producer.