INVENTED IN HUNGARY
CASE STUDY DIGIC PICTURES: MOVIE-MAKERS FOR THE GAMING WORLD flow of information with the client is essential and the company places great emphasis on talking with the customer. A dedicated account manager team facilitates communication between the customer and the production unit; it is through these that customer expectations and manufacturing information reach the team.
Ubisoft, Activision, CD Project, and Sony Computer Entertainment are just a few of the bigger names among the companies for which DIGIC Pictures has made cinematic trailers, intros, and in-game cut-scenes since its foundation in 2002. By Gergely Herpai The studio’s first work was an intro and cut-scenes for the real-time strategy video game “Armies of Exigo”, developed by Black Hole Entertainment. Thanks to its huge success, more and more major publishers asked them to make similar film intros, cut-scenes, trailers, or commercials. Thus DIGIC Picture’s name has been associated with such famous game franchises as the Assassin’s Creed
series, Final Fantasy, Mass Effect 3, Civilization V, The Witcher 3, Halo 4, Destiny, and the Call of Duty series, among others. While the Hungarian video game industry’s current situation, as far as the development of actual video games is concerned, isn’t very impressive, in the field of animation production, DIGIC Pictures truly stands out, in Hungary and internationally. For Alex Sándor Rabb, CEO, producer and co-founder of the company, a
“The very first step in working together is to get the treatment, the storyboard, or even the entire script from the client. Based on this, we get an idea of the world of the film, the characters and the locations, which helps us to create a so-called 3D animatic, in which we outline how we imagine the film,” Rabb explains. How much they get a free hand in shaping the story is customer dependent. Some clients will come with a fully developed concept, or will know exactly what characters they want. Others will ask for DIGIC Picture’s input. Rabb gives one example: when making the animated short film “The Secret War” for the “Love, Death & Robots” animation anthology running on Netflix, the client was fully open to DIGIC’s suggestions. In this case, the team worked based on a script. All the other creative and production developments needed to make the film were entrusted to them. MAJOR STARS DIGIC Pictures also sometimes works with major stars such as Kevin Spacey or John Malkovich
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