The Mill teamed up with Director Rupert Sanders and BBH on the Agency’s first spot for PlayStation. PlayStation “Greatness Awaits” follows ‘the hero’ as he walks down the street and turns the corner into a world that is all things PlayStation. It features as many PlayStation games as possible, making it all about the gamers. As the hero walks down the street, we see snippets of easter eggs before he turns the corner into the PlayStation world, that collides with our world, creating a crater where a dragon, F22 Raptors, spaceships, Corvettes, and a host of other cool things in frame come to life.

“One of the biggest challenges was the wrangling of all the assets from the game developers,” said Mill NY 3D lead Rob Petrie. “We had four weeks leading up to the shot to re-rig and switch over assets to Arnold shader’s. This time was invaluable as it meant we were ready to start animating.”

The sheer number of different elements made it beyond fun for the whole team.

Joji Tsuruga, Mill NY 3D lead and in-house gaming expert explains, “It was definitely a gamer’s dream job. Working with several assets from games we love to play was not only exciting; it also gave us an insight into how CG assets are handled in the gaming world. Although it was an ambitious project, we had an incredibly solid team that kept the process smooth straight to the end.”

“It’s not every day that one gets the opportunity to be a part of a project as great as this one,” said Mill NY 2D lead, Iwan Zwarts. “The planning phase of the job was very important and we were involved with both Rupert and BBH from very early on. Designing the effects on one continuous camera moves is always challenging but this was a new level.”

“We were really happy about the hand held feel Greig Fraser, director of photography, gave the spot and it ultimately made for a more natural feeling end result,” Zwarts explained. “Production Designer Dominic Watkins did a great job in transforming what was an empty car park into PlayStation wonderland.”

Daniel DiFelice, Mill NY 2D compositing artist that worked on the spot explained, “This was the first time any of us worked on a single shot of this scale.  From the outset we knew that our work would overlap in a single massive Nuke script. A few late nights and 7000 nodes later, the comp really came together and we ended up with a shot that I know we’re all very proud of.”

Summary by The Mill