DJ Hero’s thoroughly bombastic introductory video, which depicts in-game characters vying for control of an enormous record needle that's tearing through an urban landscape, was created by London-based visual effects studio Framestore.

Directed by Warp Films' collaborator Marco Puig, who had just completed Girls Aloud's video for Untouchable, the video joins Passion Pictures' intros for Rock Band and The Beatles: Rock Band as part of a new wave of creative intros produced by teams from outside the world of videogames.

We met with two of the principals behind the project, head of 3D commercials Diarmid Harrison-Murray and digital producer Mike Woods, to talk about how it came about, and why the company, which has created effects for James Cameron's Avatar and Harvey Dent's face in The Dark Knight, sees huge potential in working closer with game developers in the future.



How did you come about acquiring the project?
Mike Woods I’m good mates with the people at FreeStyle and had always known about the DJ Hero project. While we’d done quite a few jobs doing ad agency work with games, we’d never worked with a games production company before. It’s a much more interesting way of working to what we’re used.

Diarmid Harrison-Murray It’s very different to the usual way we work on an advert.

MW Our relationship with Warp Films, meanwhile, has been going on for years, with music promos, adverts and feature films. They said they had a hot new director, Marco, and we’d just worked with him on a pop promo for Girls Aloud [Untouchable] just as the treatments were going around.



So you had more creative control than you usually have?
DHM Yeah, in the early stages the project was very much evolving even as we started to ramp up production and do technical tests. Also, we weren’t sure whether from Activision and FreeStyle’s point of view certain artists were part of it at that point. I think at one point the storyboards had a big section with Daft Punk and they still weren’t confirmed – a totally tripped-out alien bit. But we had to move on and they still hadn’t signed up. Jay-Z was going to be in it at the end, too. What you have in there now is a mixture of in-game characters with DJ Shadow and Grandmaster Flash. Marco was here most days then, developing the idea, so it was a much more involved creative process.

How long did the project take to complete?
DHM It was about two and a half months. We ramped up to a big team in the end, about 20 to 25 people. For the first month it was only five or six of us doing the early modelling of the environments and assets and doing look development tests. Then we rooted through all our freelance contacts to meet demand for when we had all the compositions and shots planned out.

How much input did Activision and FreestyleGames have?
DHM I’d say we had a pretty free hand. Effectively, we were told the characters we had to work with. But as it stands, it’s pretty much what Marco wrote down as a treatment, which was to create a crazy visual feast with over the top onslaught of music and visuals. I guess it's due to the game being what it is – there aren’t lots of different levels and an overall narrative. There’s no story we have to support.