Driver Madness

Recently I discovered that the company behind the cool cutscenes of Driver PL is Ark VFX.

Founded in 2003, Ark VFX was one of the UKs top animation studios, directing TV ads ad game trailers.
Ark VFX closed in october 2010 after 7 years of stunning CGI production.

Click the links to see more cool stuff.




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This is one of the 30 characters created for our latest FMV project "Driver 4". Modelled and rendered with lightwave, rigged and animated with Maya. Ark produced over 30 minutes worth of animation for the game, made up of Sixteen separate scenes set in over 20 different locations.

Modelled and rendered using lightwave with G2 for the skin shader.

Sweet!

Great find Thunder.

Thanks.

I had no idea another studio was involved in the cutscene work. I always thought it was done inside of Reflections...

Sucks to hear that. But they did do an excellent job!

I also thought that, but we don't know who made the other Drivers cutscenes, maybe it was Reflections.

f***ing MOVE KID!!!

Seems that the thief is a Vietnam veteran

The amount of detail in weaponry, holy sh*t.

Great read, thx for posting Max!

Wow, awesome to see all this stuff!

ooooo devleoping things!

Driver Parallel Lines Official website photo (website is now unavailable) :

Thanks for sharing, i remember lurking that website years ago.

I remember going on there in late 2005 with IE6.

Simon O'Connor one of the Dev team or Core Tech Team (worked with Ubisoft on Driver Parallel lines) here is his insight on the game credit and some infos quote !

It differs from company to company.

My current job title is "Senior Renderer Programmer", other companies I've worked at doing the same thing at the same level I've been simply known as 'Programmer'. When I was starting out, I was also 'Programmer', no 'Junior' designation; some people at my current company do have the job title of "Junior Programmer".

Some companies also have a middle role, i.e.: Junior programmer -> Programmer -> Senior programmer.

My job title only appears on my employment contract, and if I have to deal with someone outside of our organisation.

But internally I'm just known as "one of the guys responsible for the renderer", no junior, no senior.

On the last game I worked on (Driver: Parallel Lines), the credits didn't include my job title, I was simply listed with my colleagues under a single "Core Technology" heading.

Source: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/392340-qa- ... unior-dev/

LCD Soundsystem - Tribulations, not used the first time in Driver PL but it was used in Project Gotham Racing 3 by Microsoft. It's one of the great soundtracks in 2006 era on Driver PL also the second game used that soundtrack.

"Tribulations" is the seventh single from LCD Soundsystem, released on September 27, 2005. It appeared as the third track on Disc 1 of the band's eponymous debut double album. The single's cover was designed by Michael Vadino for DFA Design. The song is featured in the 2005 video game Project Gotham Racing 3, the 2006 video game Driver: Parallel Lines, and in the episode of The Office "Night Out", when Michael and Dwight visit Ryan in a club in New York City. It is featured in the game Dance Dance Revolution: Hottest Party 2 for the Wii as an available song to dance to. Tribulations is also a featured song in the opening theme to the Sound Opinions radio show.

Source : http://www.rhymes.net/rhyme/tribulations

Driver PL Intro:

"Mark Akester" was a cinematic team leader on Driver Parallel Lines explains some insights of how he made the video and what tools used:

This is the intro video which I worked on for the video game Driver:Parallel Lines.

As cinematics team lead on this project I was responsible for all of that games cinematic content. For the intro I chose to create a montage of motion graphics which I created from the game and stock footage from that time period to set the background of the game.

I used a combination of Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, Discreet Combustion, Maya and captured game footage to put this sequence together.

The latter part of this sequence after the main title logo screen contains footage created by fmv company ArkVfx. I worked very closely with Ark on this project to whom the creation of pre-rendered cutscenes and content for those cut scenes was outsourced to.

Ahhh the Parallel Lines intro. The Driver series I think have always had great intros to their games. He's also posted a few videos Driver SF (which I know doesn't belong in this topic) but I've never see them before. Here's one about SF traffic and A.I. There looks to be a little bit more traffic in this video than in the final game though:

Nimrod Productions is a company made some handful soundtracks for the game here is a full report explains process of music composition and working with Atari on the sound side of the game: http://www.resolutionmag.com/pdfs/FACIL ... ctions.pdf

Video game writing : from macro to micro (Book)

This book contain some insight writing and case studies from Driver Parallel Lines and Driver 76 :

http://www.worldcat.org/title/video-gam ... /719430677

Big respect to Rich Aitken and Marc Canham for adding that inmersion with their compositions. I love their work on Driv3r and DPL, truly great.

PD: Thx for adding new info here.

max.thunder wrote:Thanks for sharing, i remember lurking that website years ago.

Me too, I wish if I took some images of the website when it was live, 2006 era couldn't find any image

The Making of Driver: Parallel Lines :

This video was released only in the "Limited Edition" as a bonus of how the game was close to the 70s (1978) and 00s (2006).

Adriano Gazza is the editor of this video

I was given free rein to edit this video from various interviews and in game footage whilst freelancing at a London design studio called Bleach in 2006 (sadly no more). Working with a motion designer, we created this, plus individual interviews with such music luminaries as Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, Suicide, Arthur Baker and more.

Client: Atari Games
Agency: Bleach, London
Role: Editor, Compositor

Atari Driver Parallel Lines TV Commercial :

Video is rare to find isn't related to this topic but still hard to find on the net or even youtube.

I found what seems to be a beta render:

Post edited by Skylabh.
Reason: picture no longer available.

Old. There's a bunch of early renders on Driver-Dimension. My personal favorite is this one:

There's a 720p version floating around on some site, the guy in the schoolbus is '06 TK.

Why do beta versions of Driver games look better?

TheEngiGuy wrote:Why do beta versions of Driver games look better?

I wouldn't be surprised if that is not the game in action. They just set up a nice little suitable scene and touched it up to look even better. Cos the actual beta versions look worse.

Usually beta versions of games look far finer then the final product due to developing it on an ultra high end computer, then later on they downgrade it for computers that people can actually buy. As you can see with the screenshot with the school bus, the spark effects are just an added in effect on the rendered image. DRIV3R was this way as well.