Flagship Studios was a new company when it contacted Blur to create a game trailer that could be shown at Tabula Rasa was a transitional project for Blur as it experimented with upgrading its rendering software. © 2007 NCsoft Corp.

"Having stuff that they know they want is in a sense better because you can do it and it's done and there's no question about it," Margo explains.

Blur created 21 shots for a running time of just under two minutes for the game. The challenge on this project for Blur was the number of assets required for those shots and making sure they were both completed on time and moved along to the next stage of the process as soon as possible.

On the tech side, Tabula Rasa was a transitional one for the company as it experimented with upgrading its rendering software.

With Brazil 1 beginning to show its age, Margo says Brazil 2 was in pre-release at the time and many of the bugs and features were still being worked out. He used mental ray for a lot of environment work and the versions of Brazil for different needs when it came to characters. For example, Brazil 2 was used for all the characters that had no hair because at the time the program couldn't handle hair effects. Characters with hair were done in Brazil 1.

"That was the biggest challenge," he says, "trying to juggle these three renderers and make everything cohesive looking."

Thomas J. McLean is a freelance journalist whose articles have appeared in Variety, Below the Line, Animation Magazine and Publishers Weekly. He writes a comicbook blog for Variety.com called Bags and Boards, and is the author of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, forthcoming from Sequart.com Books.