Humans and orcs will be united on the big screen this June when the much-anticipated Warcraft movie opens. Getting to that point, of course, has been a huge undertaking, and a new featurette released today by Legendary Pictures sheds light on the large-scale project.
In Creating Warcraft, director Duncan Jones and fellow crew members discuss just how unique the film is, from the fictional world it brings to life to its extensive use of motion capture.
“Anyone who makes films hopes at one point to get the chance to create a world,” said Jones in the featurette. “With strong, diverse characters and vast number of locations, Warcraft is really the biggest kind of filmmaking that you can do.”
Creating the world of Warcraft required liberal use of advanced technology, of course. The team was determined to make sure that it felt real, though, said production designer Gavin Bocquet. Therefore, they used “some of the biggest motion capture sets that have ever been created,” in the words of producer Stuart Fenegan.
Doing so allowed them to combined human and nonhuman characters in the most realistic way possible, and the results may just be unprecedented. As Bocquet put it, they’re “at the vanguard of something that hasn’t been done before.”
The movie is one of many to take the high-tech route, but they may just have done it better than anyone else. “There’s an arms race going on in the film industry to push technology,” Duncan said. “Maybe sometime we won’t be the coolest kids on the block anymore, but right now we are.”
Whether or not that’s the case remains to be seen, but we’ll see for sure in just weeks. Warcraft is slated to hit theaters on June 10.
