Hollywood, California's boutique animation house Super 78 created the animated cinematics for the recently released videogame titles PAC-MAN PARTY and PAC-MAN WORLD 2 for Namco and game developer Mass Media. The titles feature 8 1/2 minutes of animation by Super 78 featuring some of the game's popular characters including Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man. Creative director Brent Young's interest in video games helped Super 78 conceive and complete the project. "Brent took great care in creating story lines that gamers would enjoy because he too grew up on early titles like PAC-MAN," says executive producer Dina Benadon. "He is a true gamer, and it shows on projects like these." After meeting with Namco in Northern California Super 78's Young and Benadon completed treatments for each scene, which were then approved by Namco. Storyboard animatics were edited together on the Media 100 before production began. The production phase included modeling all of the characters and environments via 3D Studio Max v. 4.0 running on Dell workstations. The Super 78 artists found the new version of 3D Studio Max featured a more simplified and powerful animation tool set then previous offerings. After the animating, effects and compositing were created in Adobe After Effects 5.0, motion-capture technology via FilmBox was also used in order to garner realistic movements for the various characters. Super 78 completed story ideas, concepting and storyboards for PAC-MAN PARTY and PAC-MAN WORLD 2 as well as the cinematics and animation for the introductions, the matches and the closing cinematics.
