Telling Modern Warfare's story

How to tell Modern Warfare’s sweep of rapidly exploding global conflict? Its tightly contained levels, while driven by sensational set-pieces, hardly attempt to spin the tale of international intrigue and personal strife, Machiavellian villains and gruff special forces operatives. 

Instead, it’s down to Spov, the east-London-based CGI house that has created the inter-level cutscenes for all the Call Of Duty games since Modern Warfare. The team has, as executive producer Dan Higgott says, one per cent of the screen time and 80 per cent of the story to tell. Its cutscenes are rarely more than a minute of swooping wireframe graphics, exploding glass, growling CO voiceover and gleaming taskforce medal, but they have the inestimable job of describing the impact of previous events, what you’re doing next, where you’re going, and why.

They do a lot more besides, overlaying maps with visualisations of the places in which you’ll be fighting and military ordnance you’ll be bringing to bear – or forced to face – as well as hints about the characters’ backstories and motivations.

“But that’s less important than getting the basic information across,” Higgott says. “Even in a tightly on-rails game like Modern Warfare, it’s not that easy to get a lot of narrative points across.” 

Spov design director Yugen Blake (left) and executive producer Dan Higgott

Short, sharp and paced at the same blistering rate as the rest of the action, the cutscenes despatch you to the next boiling point so briskly that you’ll find yourself immersed in another level before the adrenaline of the previous one has eased off. It’s therefore difficult to understand how an external contractor working thousands of miles away from the development studios – in the case of Modern Warfare 3, Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games in California – can produce such coherent results.

“Sometimes we get builds of the game to play,” says design director Yugen Blake. “We didn’t get them this time, because it was such a secretive project, but [we] did get game capture. Even with the early builds, you get an understanding of how fast the gameplay is, and it’s a firstperson action game – slow animations of globes and 3D aren’t going to get the information across and aren’t going to be interesting to look at. So you have to keep it pacy and dynamic.”

Spov began work on MW3 in spring 2011, submitting video for tweaks in early August and completing in the first week of September. The developers provided scripts for each scene, which included voiceover and a general direction – sometimes just a half-page of notes that it was up to Spov to fill in. The length of each video, though, was partly dictated by available disc space; their total length in MW3 is around 15 minutes. “We wanted to be as punchy and direct as possible, to cut out any fat,” Higgott says. “If we could lose two seconds, we would to really sharpen it as much as possible…”

Early development was about differentiating MW3’s two factions – Soap and Price’s covert and Delta’s conventional operations – because the developers felt simple palette changes weren’t enough. Soap and Price’s sequences emphasise their on-the-ground activities. “We created this movable world of maps and Post-It notes; they’re in a hotel or safehouse somewhere, putting their intel on a board,” says Higgott.

“The intel board was an idea we came up with fairly early on,” Blake explains. “[The game’s] Delta advisor, a guy called Dalton Fury, was reading through some of our development notes and said, ‘We used this, guys. If you want to use it as a tool, go for it’.”

For Delta’s levels, the cutscenes highlight computer interfaces and the pixels of LCD screens: “We imagined that you’re a general and there’s a control room somewhere with all this information in it to allow you to make decisions. It’s a fictional perfect bubble in which everything is functional and correct, without any of the glitchiness and problems in real technology.”

Fictional’s key, though: the screens are embellished with data readouts and other details. “The point about military tech is that it serves a purpose, but from an animation point of view it looks awful, especially the stuff that’s evolving at the moment,” Blake says. “It looks so bad, so we really had to jazz it up and make it look sexy. But it needs plausibility.”

Visual designer Mark Coleran calls the kinds of visualisation that Spov has created “fantasy user interfaces”, or FUI (pronounced ‘phooey’), a fitting name for Modern Warfare’s artfully overcooked world. Just like the series’ engine, its cutscenes present an impossibly perfect vision of war, melding hardware and drama with peak efficiency. “Ultimately it’s entertainment and a bit of escapism,” Higgott says. “It’s the biggest game in the world. It’s fun and bombastic, but it’s also a very serious undertaking.”

Spov has recently released its showreel, showing off some of the work, including that of Modern Warfare 3, it produced in 2011.