LEGO Universe began with a wonderful opening cinematic that helped to explain the story behind Imagination, Planet Crux and its ultimate destruction, the Maelstrom, and the corruption of The Baron (and it is also pretty cool that Patrick Stewart is the voice of our storyteller). You can watch the video here:
I've always wanted to share some of the work that went into creating this trailer, as it started, as most things in LU did, with a collaboration of the concept art team and our designers. Below, you will see the last working visual storyboard sequence I worked on for the intro cinematic. Now, keep in mind that I did around ten versions of this before work from our team was passed off to LEGO's marketing team to finish it. Also, you will notice some very big differences in the look of the characters and some of the locations. For example, when this art was done, our well known pirate hero, Hale Storm was indeed a female pirate known as Gale Storm. Duke Exeter had long, dark hair, and Doc was far less techie and much more nerdy scientist. The locations in this finished cinematic are also much more developed, showing the original Imagination Temple on Crux (heck, at the time of the story art Crux wasn't even a cube planet yet, only a flat plane square with Maelstrom creeping over its edges), and also showing the development on the land chunks of existing LU playable worlds after Crux blows up.
Why so different? I think it is both interesting and important to understand that, as organized as we all wanted to be as a development team, the whole process of creating LEGO Universe was very organic. This last set of story boards that I touched for the opening cinematic, shown here, was completed in December of 2008 - almost TWO FULL YEARS before the final cinematic's completion and release of LEGO Universe! Because of that, the story of the cinematic itself evolved even in the hands of a separate company still working in conjunction with us - for example, the two color pieces at the end, done in 2009, were quick inspiration pieces used to help add some of the content to the finished cinematic - one actually making it (the destruction of a now cubed Crux), and one not making the final cut (the team, now further developed, discovering Crux with a large hologram map instead of using the found Imagination pieces, which was developed at an later stage yet).
What I find awesome - and I hope that you will too - is that even with all of the changes the essence of the story is really still there. We knew what we were doing... I think. ;)
