Reteaming with Wizards of the Coast for a third Magic: The Gathering trailer, Paris studio Unit Motion Design constructs a series of dramatic tableaux for the sci-fi/horror expansion Phyrexia: All Will Be One.

UMD CD/co-founder François-Côme du Boistesselin: “The trailer illustrates the resistance of the heroes to the Phyrexian invasion through a large freeze-frame battle composition where dazzling white porcelain statues face hordes of creatures covered in Phyrexian oil, gradually swallowing up any hope of victory.

“This graphic confrontation ends with the imposing throne of Helesh Norn composed of thousands of statues of soldiers who perished in front of it.

“To make this trailer, we modeled more than 70 statues in HD including 10 with facial expression captures based on 3D scans made at Scan Engine in Paris.

“Thanks to the enthusiasm of the Magic player community, the video reached 3.5M views in a few hours and the trailer fulfilled its role as thousands of comments illustrate the fan hype for the first Elesh Norn appearance as a CG character.”
 
 

 
Client: Wizards of the Coast

Production: Unit Motion Design
Director: Unit Motion Design
Head of production: Jade Schiff
Director/CD: François-Côme du Boistesselin
Concept Artist: Jaime Martinez, Feng Weirui, Pavel Rtishchev
Art Director/motion designer: Timo Noak, Rémi Loger
Modeler: Alfonso Gonso, Wojtek Piwowarczyk, Dirk Wachsmuth, Antonio Esparza, Andrei Le Mézec, Lucas Lefort, Jordan Weisgerber, Thibault Chapelain
Animator: Myriam Rigonnaud
VFX: Estéban Genre-Jazelet, Enrique Garcia, Dimitri Besnard
Renderer: Timo Noak, Olivier Carru, Remi Loger, Lois Ahmed, Andrei Le Merzec

3D scanning: Scan Engine

Music: Maxime Hervé
Sound design/post: Yellow Cab Studios