Supercell / Game Campaigns / 2020 to 2025

Supercell Seven Films, Five Years

Mobile GamingCharacter DesignCG

Overview

Supercell has come back to LOBO across five years and seven films, starting with Hay Day Pop in 2020 and running through Clash Mini and Clash. The work splits in two. There are the spots, which take the games out of the phone and put them somewhere with weather and dirt and a crowd. And underneath those there is the design, where the characters were specified against real material before a single frame was rendered.

The films

Hay Day Pop, then Clash.

Hay Day Pop came first, two films built on the small pleasure of things falling into place. Clash Mini followed, and with it the whole design language of figures made from real material. It ran twice: once in a storm, and then again at Christmas, the same forty six second edit rebuilt in snow with candy cane markers and the cast in Santa hats. Flood is the most recent and the furthest from the phone.

The design

Three characters, and the same broom.

The Clash Mini figures were not designed as models. They were designed as things. Every sheet pins the drawing to photographs of real material: painted wood for the body, hessian for the cloth, beaten copper, coiled rope, hammered rivets. The same household broom appears on all three, cut differently each time. It is the Monk’s hair and moustache, the Shield Maiden’s hair, and the Swordsman’s purple tail. The Swordsman’s fish was photographed too, a real silver sardine, before it became a weapon. Designing against real material is what stops a CG character feeling weightless, because it gives the render something true to aim at. The same sheets carry the articulation, so the elbow, wrist and fingers were settled in the same pass as the surfaces.

Design sheet for the Monk, with photographs of a broom, rope, rivets and cloth called out against the drawing

The Monk. Broom for the hair, rope, rivets, hessian, copper

Design sheet for the Shield Maiden with leather, metal and wood callouts

Shield Maiden. The same broom, cut short

Design sheet for the Swordsman with cloth, rope and metal callouts

Swordsman. The broom dyed purple, and a real sardine

The board

The Battle Box.

The same rule ran through the board the figures stand on. Every surface was picked from a real reference and called out before anything was modelled: wood for the frame, felt for the field, cloth, leather, rock. It is the difference between a game board on a screen and a game board on a table.

Every surface answered for

The finished Battle Box board laid out with its pieces

The board as an object

The cast

Lit like a product, not a game screen.

Away from the films the cast was staged on a single grey and lit as if for a shelf. No arena, no interface, no particle effects to hide behind. Which means every pose has to carry from silhouette alone, and every material has to hold up with nothing happening around it. The poses were cut together as films of their own, which is the version below.

Two archers and a mounted knight around a locked treasure chest on a grey backdrop

A green dragon lying down surrounded by goblins on a grey backdrop

Fire spirits, skeletons and archers mid action on a grey backdrop

An armoured champion and a lava hound on a grey backdrop

A rock giant flanked by smaller characters on a grey backdrop

In the world

Then the arena fills up.

The films put all of it into weather and crowd. The same figures that were photographed against grey end up in a stadium, in a jungle village, under attack, at a scale where the material work is what keeps them readable.