The Blizzard Insider recently sat down with Nick Carpenter, Blizzard’s cinematic creative director, for a behind-the-scenes look at the StarCraft II cinematic teaser recently released at the Worldwide Invitational, as well as to discuss the challenges involved with continuing the single-player storyline from the original game.

The article covers the different stages for creating the Cinematic shown at WWI 2007, such as Concept, Storytelling, and technology.  Tychus Findlay is revealed to be a role character in Starcraft II Storyline.  The article also reveals most of the dialogues will use an in-game cinematic engine technology, an enhanced version of that on Warcraft III, where Blizzard can control the camera position. Make sure to read the full Insider Interview at the official Starcraft 2 Site.

Insider: Let’s talk a little bit about how your team and the game design team for StarCraft II work together to create the cinematics. What role does each team play in coming up with ideas, and how are they then transformed into the actual movies?

Nick Carpenter: There’s a great deal of collaboration going on between all the teams that work on StarCraft II. We have a lot of brainstorming sessions where people from my team, the StarCraft design team, and our creative team sit down and throw around story ideas, character ideas, and just general thoughts of what’s going to happen next.

For example, as we were coming up with the concept for the teaser cinematic and fleshing out the details for the marine portrayed in it, that marine evolved over time into a character, named Tychus Findlay, that features prominently in StarCraft II. Ultimately, the creative process involved with working Tychus into a certain role in the plot and fleshing him out helped us give him even more character depth in the cinematic.

Also, one of the big advantages of the cinematics team working directly with the game design team is that the cinematics are completely consistent with the game we’re making, which isn’t always the case when you’re hiring an external company. Since we’re part of the creative process, there’s always a strong sense of consistency and continuity between the actual game and the cinematics.

Thanks, danny1992