It all started on a Friday afternoon. The entire production team paid a visit to our cinematics department for a meeting about “What can each individual do to improve our game by 10%”. My idea was to make good movies, but while listening to all the other passionate leaders of the game answer the question I got the idea of doing something cool not only for the game but for ourselves! What could be a better way to motivate a passionate team then to have highly detailed figures of our upcoming game! So I proposed the project to some higher-ups at Ubisoft’s HQ in Paris and they helped me in the project off the ground. (Thanks to Eric and Cedrick!)
The process took about one year, as I was only working nights and weekends on the busts. I started by working with the team to make some 3d mock-ups of what the finished figures should look like. The first one to be modeled was the American JSF Rifleman, next came the European Federation Enforcer Corps. Rifleman and the Russians. Because of issues such as cost, size, etc., I had to carefully choose the right materials for production. Plus, since these were going to be made in very small runs the challenge was much greater.
There were two sizes for the project that I liked the most, and to my great pleasure, Ubisoft chose to go with the bigger one. Once that decision was made I went ahead to making a sculpture with Super Sculpy and wax (see the pictures of the brownish waxes). The tools used were really simple: dentist tools, toothbrushes and needles. I really wanted to make these good, with strong balance, sharp details (even the 1mm bolts have the + in the middle for the screwdrivers!) and most of all, I wanted them to look exactly like the game models, but at the time the game models were not finished, so I recovered all the nice concepts made by the team and selected the ones I felt were the strongest units visually.
Once I was happy with the wax sculptures of the units and all their weapons we took some pictures and sent them out for Tom Clancy’s approval. Again, to my surprise, they were approved instantly! Now all that was left was production of the units and the package design.
I opted for the best resin on the market to ensure crisp casts, and for a nice simple “sculpture like” black delicately coated with a silver paint job. This way, I knew we were creating classic Clancy figures. When we casted the first test run I was amazed to see that there was no detail loss, everything was as sharp as on my originals, they were perfect! I was incredibly happy with the results!
For the packaging, I wanted to be totally sober. Less is more, so I went for an almost entirely black box with the EndWar logo in silver on the front of the small box. As for the super- limited triple pack, I added some black and white pictures of the figures on each the sides…I love it! If you are lucky, you may get the signed version!
Hopefully we can share more and more of our cool game characters with our fans. Until then, I hope you enjoy these Limited Edition Tom Clancy’s 10 Year Anniversary Busts as much as the team has! Also, I should point out that the busts currently sold on the website are an extra-special limited-edition first run!
Thanks
Hugues Martel
