Need for Speed™ Most Wanted – Roman Altenburg Portfolio

Need for Speed™

Most Wanted

Trailers

It was a great honor to be invited by EA to join the marketing assets team of Criterion in Guildford, UK for the latest entry in the Need for Speed – Most Wanted franchise. Our main objective was to create various high-octane trailers for their new game.

Hybrid Telemetry & Animation Pipeline

Our workflow bridged live gameplay with traditional DCC tools. After concepting each trailer, we storyboarded individual shots and used the live game build for virtual location scouting. We recorded multi-car driving physics as telemetry data one car at a time, then ported that raw data into Autodesk Maya.

In Maya, we combined the vehicles, fine-tuned their choreography, and animated the cameras to capture a raw, cinematic feel. Working closely with Criterion’s core developers, we provided feedback to iteratively refine these internal pipeline tools, ensuring the final animation data could sync seamlessly back into the game engine for high-resolution rendering.

Launch Trailer

The Hero Asset

For me, the pinnacle of this project was creating the V-formation shot on the bridge at dawn. By balancing complex vehicle choreography with dramatic atmospheric lighting, the shot was selected by EA’s global marketing team as the primary hero asset to anchor the international campaign around it by using it for printed banners and posters and as a teaser image on gaming websites.

Visual R&D: From Trailer to Shipped Game

A major technical challenge was that the game’s real-time particle systems (tire smoke, sparks, debris) were not yet mature enough for high-fidelity marketing assets. I stepped in to handle the look development of these systems.

The visual benchmarks and behaviors I established for these particles were so successful that the game’s director asked the effects developers to imitate my work, defining the look of the final shipped game. As I was not restricted by real time render limits, I worked with them to find ways to reduce the effects enough so the engine can handle them while at the same time keeping the essence of my work.

Multiplayer Trailer

Live Action

The Live Action portion of the last trailer was directed by Jon Favreau (yes, him). My task was to engineer a clean, visual transition from the live-action footage into the game engine assets. While the real-time graphics fidelity of that era made a perfectly seamless cut a major hurdle, I successfully developed a creative editing and compositing solution that bridged the two worlds effectively given the technical constraints.

It was a very interesting balance of Jon mimicking our previous camera work and editing style from the trailers and us, in turn, mimicking Jon’s style to match his work.

Live Action Trailer

Shot Breakdown & Contributions

Below is a curated cut highlighting the specific shots, particle systems, and composition transitions I was responsible for across the trailers (I am not claiming the logo animation).