Deus Ex: Human Revolution Title Sequence Q&A

As I mentioned in my Deus Ex: Human Revolution preview early last year, I thought the video showing Adam Jensen being augmented at the beginning of the game was the most impressive credits sequence I’ve ever seen. And I’m apparently not alone in that opinion, as the guys at Art of the Title were so impressed with it that they reached out to interview Goldtooth Creative’s Paul Furminger and Eidos Montreal’s Jean-François Dugas about the staggering amount of work that went into it:

Art of the Title: At what point in the game’s development did work begin on the title sequence?

Jean-François Dugas: We started to work on it in the final year of development for about three months straight.

Paul Furminger: Yeah, about a year before the ship date, around the same time that we began the pre-rendered cut scenes for the game and just after the release of the E3 CGI trailer.

As co-writer and editor of the trailers, I was very familiar with the material and eager to re-purpose some of the masterful imagery that Visual Works/Square Enix had produced. Because the game resolution was 720p and the trailers were rendered at 1080p, I was able to blow up and reposition elements from the CGI trailers for use in the title sequence. I would’ve loved to get new CGI from the same team for the title sequence, but the timing wasn’t right the team at Visual Works had already moved on to another project.

Consequently, the original computer-generated imagery seen in the title sequence had to be created in-house by a small team led by Mike Smith-Kennard. We focused all our CG production energy on key visuals: the heart covered with Sarif-owned circuitry, the gears driving augmentations deep into Jensen’s body, and the robotic arm splayed out on the operating table, among others.

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Art of the Title: How did you approach the live-action portion of the sequence?

Paul Furminger: Once we decided to take the mixed media approach for the opening credits, I went through the animatic and clearly defined the shots that would need live-action elements. The entire shoot was done over two easy days, each around eight hours, which is very relaxed for a live-action shoot. On the first morning, we shot all the love scenes with our Megan and Adam lookalikes. In the afternoon, we put Adam on our futuristic operating table and got all of the surgery shots. On the second day, we shot all of the still elements, the pyro/effects plates, and we did the more serious operation shots for example, we shot the circular saw cutting into the fake human body on the second day.

As far as putting it all together, the goal was always to seamlessly blend the CG, motion graphics, and live-action shots to create a surreal, etherized vision of the operation. I worked with Scott, our production designer, to find elements that would fit into the world already defined by the CG shots. Often, Scott created the futuristic surgical tools by taking parts from modern-day computers, household hardware, power tools, and medical supplies.

Then with Paal, our DP, we created simple rules that we would also follow when compositing the CG and motion graphics: 1) always light for the black and gold look, knowing that the blacks will be crushed in post, adding cyan accents where possible; 2) shine lights directly into the camera (there are lots of lens flares in the future!); 3) shoot with as many foreground elements as possible with very shallow depth of field in order to hide the boundary between live action and CG elements; 4) add atmosphere and particles to as many shots as possible (scenes with many layers were shot clean and the particles were added in compositing).

In the final sequence, there are 25 shots, not counting the title cards. Of those 25 shots, 14 are live action, 9 are computer-generated, and two were created in motion graphics using 2D animation on stills and photographed elements. The laser shot, for example, was entirely created from one still of a horse tranquilizer that we shot on our second day. The still was modified in Photoshop and then animated in After Effects.

Highly recommended reading.  Make sure you hit up the interview itself, too, because there are a handful of never-before-seen artwork pieces and videos complementing it.