Diablo 3 opening cinematic 2011

The new intense cinematic intro of Diablo3 is introduced by Blizzard. It develops new artistic means by combining traditional fantasy art with Manga animation for the beginning few seconds. As far as all this is set  to be appeared in a book which turns out to be the dream of someone it makes reference to rich symbolism.
and rather new visual experience.

Of course we could think that this prophetic dream is just the sign of a shortage of production time where concept art cannot develop to a higher CGI level. But anyway let turn ourselves into a charitable interpreter and say that this is an artistic solution no matter how necessary it was.

Anyway the solution is very nice, even if it has some immodest symmetry to Hellboy II's animated prologue scene in its originality (and the origin of all such thing: Fallout2). It is a good start to try Maya3d’s capability of producing cartoons made of pure concept art.And it is nice that they have the classic blizzard crow for the beginning.

The dream or prophecy is of a young girl, one of the few very realistic woman characters of the history of cgi. This makes this trailer extraordinary already. Very professional modelling and render as it has been always with Blizzard. So if you want a school example of CGI animation you should check this out no matter what. It is really hard to find any mistake in it. Maybe the first cartoon part is a little bit too long and perspective space is not really working everywhere there. Maybe it is so by the authors intention to develop some tension by the imperfect perspectivity, I don’t have any answers for these questions.

The script is little bit too ordinary but well this is this game anyway. So there comes apocalypse and BUMM. And that will be of course terrible. The orphan living with his uncle (it is the grandfather type actually so they have about 60 years between them which is a little bit too much) is not the most shockingly new idea I have ever came across with but the realization is really nice. They have a very intimate connection. So I did not feel that I am jumping into a cliché.

I find a little bit... well I don’t know. When it happens we all know that something will happen with the old folk and his niece and when the small drops of wood and stone starts to pour from the roof we all know that a big boom will happen very-very soon. I think the cuts here could have been different to elevate tension. It has the slight feeling that the old folk just too slow for this. Actually this frustration is a nice artistic tool to emphasize that the he is just too old for this.
There is however one undeniable problem with the intro. We have a big scene of apocalyptic war with godlike heroes where we hear that the world ends soon. And what happens? It begins... with a meteorite striking the earth? C’mon! Is that all?

I think technically it is a perfect clip those guys made everything they could and what they were told to picture they did very well. But that guy who figured out the story could have had a little more time to think a little bit out of the box of fantasy clichés. 

So here the come the numbers:

Story: 6/10 (good old story, no surprises)
Director: 6/10 (we know what will happen next for the whole time of the clip)
Modelling: 10/10 (great, detailed job, phenomenal!) 
Animation: 10/10 (All bodies move differently, perfect weight control, eye-movement, they can be alive!)
Render and lights: (10/10) (Fantastic in all good sense. I could not pick a lost ray of light there)
Material/textures: 10/10 (Beautiful despite the low light set of the clip. Even next to the fire, materials looks nice.)
Photography: 10/10 (Nice heroic compositions)
Editing/effects: 8/10 (that do you believe me part could have been edited out easily)
Music: 9/10 (Nice composition in accordance with the rest of the audio but nothing extraordinary)
Visual concept: 10/10 (nice classic fantasy art just the way we all like it)

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Overall: 9.0

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