The very first trailer for Warcraft: The Beginning hit the internet today, allowing us all finally to log in to Duncan Jones' World of Warcraft account and see what's in his inventory. Anyone who's logged a few hundred hours playing time will feast their eyes on some very familiar sights, from the streets of Stormwind to the tempestuous skies of the orc home world, Draenor. For everyone else, however, Jones has provided a handy breakdown of the trailer's major beats to help you catch up with your level 100 brethren.
"I'd been working with this guy Jeff White at ILM, who has done the Incredible Hulk on the Avengers movies. He was the guy who was leading up our Orcs on the creature side. He showed me some of the early prototype work he had done moving that technology on for what he wanted to do with the Orcs. It was absolutely extraordinary. And I knew I was going to write this character to be someone that the audience was just going to cry about and absolutely love. So if I can do that, are we going be able to deliver the visuals? Seeing what he was doing, I knew we were."
"Travis is a hell of a charismatic guy. I always had this sneaky suspicion that nobody else believed I was going to be so successful getting the audience to care about the orcs; that we would really need someone to bring it on the human side to balance the scales a little bit. I knew that we needed someone who was going to really grab the audience's attention and be magnetic. Travis did that. He's a farm boy to boot, so he's got a natural, gritty, mud-between-his-toes quality that makes you really believe him in the role."
"The armour was Mayes Rubeo, our costume designer. Warcraft has such a distinct look within the game world. Mayes and Blizzard worked very closely together with me and in designing a version of the Warcraft armor that could be believable within a live action environment. And that was always the challenge, because even the body types of Warcraft characters are over the top."
"The orcs are broad. They're broad and they get there's an interesting shape to them, because the head size is comparable to a human. But they're incredibly broad-shouldered and then massively handed. They're like a homunculus – it's a strange shape. That comes straight out of the Warcraft game. And it was always a question of whether it was going to work as a live action thing. With only a few minor adjustments, it absolutely has."
"We’ve been working on this film for coming up on three years now, so I hadn't actually seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes when we were casting. It wasn't out yet. But I knew Toby Kebbell and I absolutely adored him, especially from that Black Mirror episode that he did. I took a bit of risk casting him sight unseen as far as mo-cap acting was concerned. Toby's a fantastic actor and having Toby gave confidence to the other actors that we brought in who had not done motion capture before. Whether it was Rob Kazinsky and Daniel Wu or Clancy Brown and some of the others. Toby really galvanized them."
"Garona is very much our bridging character between the human world and the Orc world. She travels with the Orcs at the start of the movie and then she becomes almost in a sense the eyes of the audience as far as the differences between human and Orc culture. There was an early question of whether we were going to do Garona as a live action character or a C.G. character. It felt like the right decision for that character was to go live action. But there weren’t that many people who could make that physically strong and also emotionally strong character work. I had seen a Mission: Impossible movie she was in and thought ‘Yeah, Paula Patton would really nail this.’ And she definitely did."
"We talked early on about whether there was an Orc accent. I really felt strongly that there wouldn't be, cause they're separate tribes. So it's okay if there's softer regional accents for the different tribes. We don't make a big deal about it, but it's there to kind of give you a sense of the multiple facets of Orc culture. There was a certain deliberate and very quiet performance that Toby does that gives his Durotan character a very distinctive sound compared to, you know, Rob [Kazinsky] who's a bit more gruff."
"That's Draka, Durotan's wife. And that's a pretty great scene actually that comes up around that moment. And a baby. That baby is a very important presence in the movie…"
"Stormwind. The regions and their rooftop coloration are correct for the hardcore fans out there. We have the mailboxes on the streets as well and there’s a ‘Wanted: Hogger’ poster on a notice board."
"This is a shot over the backs of the Frost Wolves looking at Westfall. In the background you can see a scarecrow by a bunch of pumpkins. That's a pretty nerdy shot right there."
"That's Elwynn Forest. We built those trees, so they're absolutely gigantic. I think they were about 12 feet across. It does give this very distinctive Warcraft hyper-reality that we were trying to achieve throughout the movie."
"There is a fight scene with a Gryphon, which I think is a lot of fun. I'm not trying to sell DVDs here but for those people who do want to slow down and look at stuff that's going on, there's so much detail in some of the action in this film that you will want to look at things again. The Gryphon does some great stuff. We had a lot of fun with the animation of that."
"That was Travis being a madman. He was obviously on a wire. But he did about a 30 foot drop and was more than happy to do it a couple of times. On one of them he thought ‘Oh, you'll like this,’ and he basically ran off the place, jumped and threw the sword from one hand to the other. We were like ‘Yeah, why not?’ He's a hero."