The style of the recent Gears of War 3 TV advertisement is evocative of the spots for the first two games, but it is still more frenetic than those previous ads. One thing very similar is the inclusion of the melancholy song Into Dust, very evocative of Mad World and How It Ends.

“You want to run away from what you’ve done before,” says Scott Duchon. “But the right thing for Epic was to celebrate the end of this franchise as it always lived.”

While the ad was built using the same engine as the game, new effects were brought in so the environment could decay in the background even while the battle rages on in the foreground. “Everything moving is live action. Everything static and dead is time lapse,” says director Adam Berg.

Berg manipulated what was shown using an actual handheld monitor in a motion-capture studio to simulate the virtual camera movements. “You can see the animatic in the monitor, and move around in that world, seeing all the houses and streets and burned-out cars. It’s amazing,” he says.

There’s no sound other than the music, and Duchon points to the scene in Saving Private Ryan in which Captain Miller loses his hearing after an explosion as an example of the cinematic power. “There couldn’t be a more visceral reaction to that scene,” Duchon says. “In these first- and third-person shooters, there’s so much noise. Sometimes it’s the quiet that cuts through.”

Source: AdWeek