Assassin's Creed Lineage Short Film Debuts

Back during E3 2009, one of Ubisoft's major press conference announcements was the company's creation of a new studio called Ubisoft Digital Arts. It was built around their recently acquired special effects studio called Hybrid, the crack team you might recognize from their work on the films Sin City and 300. According to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, the goal of the new studio is a focus on convergence -- streamlining the creation of all digital entertainment from games, to movies, to digital shorts. Recently I had the opportunity to see the fruits of this concept when Ubisoft premiered the first short film for Assassin's Creed II.

Assassin's Creed Lineage fills in the back story of ACII by focusing on the exploits of Ezio's father, Giovanni Auditore da Firenze, a master Assassin. Ezio makes a short cameo in the first segment, but he is young and naive, and not yet an important player in the saga. The most noticeable element of the short is how eerily similar everything is to the game. That's because the environments were rendered directly from the Anvil Engine, the same engine used in both Assassin's Creed games. Ubisoft also cast the same actors in the film that were digitally interpreted for the videogame and inserted using a green screen. The result is a world that looks extremely similar to the the game but is strangely realistic. It's often difficult to distinguish which elements are computer generated and which items might actually exist.

The film ran for approximately 12 minutes, but is only the first installment in a series that will last a bit under an hour. The first installment will debut on YouTube on October 27th. We are still waiting to find out how the rest of the films will be distributed and its possible that even Ubisoft has yet to make a final decision on this matter. After all, this type of content reaches out into uncharted territory, straddling the line between cinema and game.

One thing we do know is that this is a good indication of things to come. Because the same engine was used to render the backgrounds it is conceivable that the next generation of consoles could output a game as visually impressive as the short film. Developers close to the project spoke of the possibility of some day watching a film such as this one, pausing it during an action sequence, then jumping in to take control of the characters yourself. In this way the perfect convergence between cinema and game is accomplished by giving the viewer ultimate control over which is which.

Credit : ps3.ign.com