“The Witcher 4” Teases Gamers, Courtesy Platige Image and CD Projekt RED
The official cinematic trailer for “The Witcher 4,” which premiered during The Game Awards gala in Los Angeles recently, provided an inside look at what gamers can expect when the title launches later this year. A continuation of one of the highest-rated productions in history, “The Witcher 4” will feature a new Witcher saga with Ciri as its protagonist. The trailer was produced by the visual effects studio Platige Image and game development studio CD Projekt RED.
The plot of the new trailer centers around two characters: Mioni, a young girl resigned to her fate, and Ciri, a witcher who rejects the village’s bloody tradition. In the trailer, both characters are each other’s mirror images.
Sebastian Kalemba, Game Director of The Witcher 4, explains it this way. “The time has come to focus the story on Ciri, who is determined to follow the witcher’s path. Mioni saying goodbye to her father feels very personal to her because she senses the same thing she has been struggling with all her life, the almost constant weight of other people’s expectations.”
“Ciri practically feels what Mioni probably does,” adds Tomek Suwalski, Director from Platige Image. “She had grown up with a sense of duty and a belief that you should act in a certain way, even though deep inside you feel it’s wrong. Their short interaction in the woods, when Ciri tells her ‘Save yourself!’ are the words that could have been spoken by an older sister, a friend, or someone equally close. She speaks those words because she knows perfectly well how Mioni feels and that her life is much more important than the sense of duty with which she had been brought up.”
The scale of the project was enormous, starting with a story created jointly by CD Projekt RED and Platige Image, followed by a 14-day-long mocap session, stunt team coordination, and the entire production process. What merits particular mention is the process of creating the monster animation.
“We wanted the Bauk to look just right, so we created an animation bible for its character,” explains Maciej Pietras, Animation Director at CD Projekt RED. “We divided it into several parts: the head resembling a goblin’s, a snakelike neck, front paws similar to a jaguar’s but with scorpion pincers, and hind legs and the tail of a dinosaur. That allowed us to prepare documentation and make sure that the result will match the initial premise.”
Adds Maciej Kwiatkowski, Stunt Coordinator at Alpha 7, “We created a physical model of Bauk’s head and arms that required four operators. You could say that we’ve recreated the entire monster. We prepared a sequence of movements, we did test choreography and it was a success — it looks fantastic on the screen.”
More details about the making of the trailer can be found in the behind-the-scenes footage.
