Developer: Guerrilla Games
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

From the creators of the Killzone franchise, this brandnew and highly acclaimed action role playing game is the best-selling 1st-party new IP for the PS4 to date. Fans worldwide were instantly hooked by the fresh and brilliantly stylized representation of gigantic and visually detailed machines roaming their new habitat in a post-apocalyptic world. But that’s not enough: the red-haired heroine Aloy is set to be – hands down – one of gaming’s iconic characters that Players will fall in love with.
We are extraordinarily happy and proud of being part of this huge endeavor that Guerrilla Games undertook. Bringing life to the world, the characters and particulary their already famous heroine Aloy throughout the massive narrative was an enormous task that we were allowed to help with.
We became part of their journey in assisting them with the cutscene production from 2015 until 2016 by creating more than two dozen cutscenes for the game. Furthermore, we helped the team at Guerilla with the creation of the well known Machines-, Cinematic- and Launch-trailers and TV-Commercial that launched worldwide 2016 and 2017.

In this process, we started with an in-depth briefing by Guerrilla about the world, history and narrative strings that were all tied together making the story as cohesive and deep as it is. Under the supervision of the Cinematics Director, Jonathan Kray, we collaborated on preparing the written scenes for the full body motion capture sessions and to record complete scenes with actors on our stage.
The motion capture data was cleaned up and solved to the corresponding characters. With the solved character data we started the scene layout process until everything was virutally staged according to our own and, of course, the director’s intention. The approved scene was then passed to the talented hands of our animators. After this polishing pass, we intergrated the fully animated scene into Guerrilla’s unique Maya scene setup using their tools so they could finish up the implementation and add facial animation.

Appendix:
For the individual trailer productions a small team of our cutscene specialists were at the Guerrilla Headquarters in Amsterdam helping them out directly on site. They were trained to become familiar with the internal pipeline, tools and different workflows in order to fullfill their role.

The official websites are:
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/horizon-zero-dawn-ps4/
https://www.guerrilla-games.com/play/horizon