Intel ® Visual

VIDEO GAME ENGINE POWERS
STAN LEE’S THE GUARDIAN
PROJECT ACROSS MEDIAS
BY JOHN GAUDIOSI
THE MAN WHO CONJURED SOME OF THE
MOST BELOVED SUPERHEROES OF ALL TIME,
including Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America,
and Thor, has a new legion of heroes primed
for the twenty-first century. Stan Lee’s The
Guardian Project offers 30 unique, animated
characters, each based on an existing National
Hockey League (NHL) franchise. To attract a new,
younger generation of hockey fans, the NHL has
partnered with Lee’s POW! Entertainment and
SLG Entertainment to create Guardian Media
Entertainment (GME). GME is deep into production
of a cross-platform franchise set to launch in
conjunction with the 2011–12 NHL season. And
powering the new computer-generated TV series
and online video game is Epic Games’ Unreal
Engine* 3 technology, marking the first time
game engine technology has been used for a
mainstream Hollywood television project.
Peter Krygowski, the director of The Guardian
Project at Vicon House of Moves (HOM), where
the performance capture for these digital
characters was created, said that game engine
resolution has reached a place where it can
address the quality that other media demands.
“A cross-pollination is now happening between
games and other media,” explained Krygowski,
who has been active in the video game space
for 12 years. “Obviously, games have been in
the public eye for a while, but only recently has
the talent behind them begun to work in other
media, applying their problem-solving ideas to
traditional pipelines.”
Building Across Mediums
The pipeline that HOM used for this digital
undertaking relied on Intel® Xeon® processor
quad-core technology to bring high-resolution,
fully detailed computer-generated (CG) characters
to life. Each character is a superhero version of
a hockey team, possessing unique super powers
and representing a specific city and environment.
The San Jose Shark, for example, uses his
Silicon Valley roots to hack into computers with
technopathy. Krygowski said the overall goal
was to tell a story that connects each character’s
super powers with its city.
“The artist who designed these characters with
Lee has a background in character animation and
design for both television and gaming, and he
warned us that many designs would have to be
simplified to work for both outlets,” recalled Tony
Chargin, executive vice president of GME Creative
Affairs. “However, when we began working with
Vicon, their process allowed us to realize in our
final products all of the detail we imagined in the
original designs, without sacrificing anything.”
intel visual adrenaline no. 10, 2011 3