If you haven’t done so already, make today the day you spend about 15 minutes to peek into the future of high-profile game franchise building, courtesy of Ubisoft. Yesterday Ubisoft released the first part of a live action short-film trilogy promoting Assassin’s Creed II. The short films, eventually totaling about 38 minutes in runtime, act as a prequel to the story that players will experience in the game. They feature the same actors whose voice and likeness appear in the sequel.
The films are the work of the game publisher’s in-house creative staff and Hollywood production company Hybride Technologies. Hybride was responsible for the special effects in Warner Brothers’ green-screen girded 300. Ubisoft’s Yannis Mallat has called out the Assassin’s Creed Lineage shorts as having the same production value the publisher would want in a full length feature film. Mallat has also said the effort is an experiment by Ubisoft in filmmaking, one that may lead to bigger involvement for the company in Hollywood projects based on its game properties.
Watch it at YouTube.