“Flank ’em.”
With Tom Clancy’s The Division seeing its release earlier this week, Aussie fan filmmakers Fury Fingers decided to imagine what the game’s tactics and tech might look like in real life. And the result? Well, you’ll have to see for yourself:
With a small budget sponsored by Ubisoft — their first film that hasn’t been self-funded — Fury Fingers hired snow machines, lights and fog machines to turn a few sleepy streets in summer Adelaide into a cold winter’s night in The Division’s infected New York. The men even wore crushed up candy in their beards to simulate snow.
As they have with many of their other films, Fury gathered a bunch of different collaborators on this project including Adelaide’s JusZ Cosplay, actor and stuntman Cameron James, local makeup artist Cody Porter and cosplay group Task Force Taipan who helped put together the game’s many props and weapons. Local cosplay photographer Steamkittens came along to snap some stills and behind-the-scenes shots as well. Ubisoft even sent over three of the watches from the game for the main trio — which were apparently huge, heavy and damn expensive.
As the game’s beta hadn’t even opened when Fury Fingers started filming for The Diversion, the team had to rely on preliminary gameplay videos to figure out as much as they could about the game’s world. “I watched, I think, every video from E3 and the trailers Ubisoft had released because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing when I got on set,” said JusZ Cosplay.
They also based the core team off the key characters from the gameplay trailers: Megan, Ryan and Bronson, taking those characters as a base for the parody element. “I don’t think the characters will be a big part of the franchise, but setting up a core three was important for the film,” Fury’s Nicholas Cleary explained.
In true cosplay style, JusZ put together her Megan costume herself: “I sourced all my costume pieces from op shops and post-christmas sales, in addition to what I had in my closet and costume stash. It was nice to have a costume that was real people clothes!”
Aside from all the real elements created by JusZ and Task Force Taipan — such as the 3D printed shoulder-mounted relay devices — there was obviously a need for plenty of VFX to simulate all the fun weapons and gadgets of the game. “Working with CG fire was a new challenge,” Nicholas added. “I owe fire-guy Zach Hamilton his life back now.”
Even with a budget, the whole team still put a lot of their own time and effort into creating The Diversion. “There were some very late nights,” JusZ explained. “I know a few, if not most of us, worked and then came on set to shoot until 3am, and it was pretty warm running around in full winter gear in the middle of summer, but it was 100% worth it.”
Comments
5 responses to “Everything’s A Diversion In This The Division Fan Film”
Shame about the tracer effects.. looks like they are firing Star Wars blasters..
jesus, everything about the VFX makes me so sad
I love comedies.
The game has been out literally less 2 days, it’s a little early to be making fan films.
Sometimes I think that these indy film makers get a bit caught up on how cool it is, and how much fun they’re having running around shooting guns…and they forget to make a story that’s actually interesting. For the audience, seeing someone shooting guns isn’t interesting at all. It’s commonplace.