Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III | A HyperJump Productions Case Study
Today we dive deep into one of our biggest and most ambitious projects to date, our epic short film produced for the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. From underwater cinematography, to zombie prosthetics, impressive VFX, and more, this is a project we're particularly proud of.
In 2023, HyperJump Productions were honored to produce a video campaign to promote the new Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare III. We sat down with our founder, Dennis Chehade, to talk about the project in detail. For this campaign, he served as Director (along with Andrew Kadamani) and Director of Photography.
How It Started
This all starts with PLG, or Power League Gaming. PLG are a company who handle eSports throughout the MENA region, including doing a lot of work with EA Sports and Activision. They have a phenomenal warehouse in Dubai Production City, and what they do is bring brands to get them connected with the gaming industry. As an example, KFC. They've worked with a number of worldwide brands, facillitating sponsorships and partnerships in the world of gaming and eSports.
Dennis first came into contact with PLG through another organization, Al Boom Diving, which he was involved with. Al Boom are a noted diving school in Dubai, who helped Dennis gain his Open Water Diving, Safety Rescue, and Advanced Diving certificates. Through this, he's gained experience operating cameras under water, a skill which would come in handy for the Call of Duty campaign.
Dennis offered to make Al Boom Diving a commercial for free, in exchange for fourth months of specialized diving and underwater video operations training. This turned out to be a great success for both parties. The ad proved very popular for Al Boom, and it also caught the eye of a member of PLG's team, who reached out to Dennis to make a proposal for the Call of Duty project. His specialized underwater cinematography training had proven an asset.
Ultimately, Dennis' enthusiasm for filming in any number of elements, but especially underwater, was a key factor in HyperJump Productions winning the project. Dennis' storied history with diving, including cave diving, and operating heavy cameras underwater, impressed the client. This is because, for the Call of Duty team, a dive scene was essential for their vision of the project.
Al Boom themselves would become a key support for arranging the project, helping Dennis get in contact with boat rental companies to facillitate the military speed boats scene that would appear in the final film.
For Dennis and the team, this was an incredibly exciting prospect - by far, at that time, HyperJump's biggest contract to date. This meant a lot more resources and personnel than they had access to before, allowing them to plan for something truly special.
When it was revealed that the campaign would also focus on the iconic Zombies game mode in Call of Duty, Dennis was unbelievably hyped. This was the sort of project he'd been waiting his whole career for, a chance to show off HyperJump's capabilities on a massive scale, to a huge audience, for a product the team themselves were incredibly passionate about.
"It's Call of Duty. It's Zombies. I grew up on this as a kid. I have to blow people away with this. I have to make the most impressive commercial ever." - Dennis Chehade, Founder of HyperJump Productions
How it Came Together
Dennis called up everyone he knew. This included 35-40 people who volunteered to be extras in the project, playing the hoarde of zombies that charges the compound in the final film. Finding a way to transport all of this talent to Ras Al-Khaimah, where the project would be shot, would prove to be a challenge.
This brings to attention the location, which would be key to selling the narrative the campaign wanted to convey. The team chose Al Jazeera Al Hamra Heritage Village, a cultural site which is the last remaining heritage pearling village in the UAE. This site had inspired an actual map in the Call of Duty games, and its "ghost town" atmosphere, mixed with the beautiful historical architecture, made it an iconic setting for the campaign. Locking in the location required a lot of phone calls, a lot of paperwork, and a good amount of the budget. But all of this was worth it for Dennis, who knew the location would elevate the film's aura and UAE representation.
Around this time, Dennis also got in touch with his friend Andrew Kadamani, CEO of Gamma Engineering, in the hopes of collaborating on the project. It didn't require much convincing - who wouldn't want to work on something for Call of Duty? - and soon, they had an agreement. Andrew would co-direct with Dennis, in exchange for access to Gamma's incredible arsenal of high-end film gear.
What Andrew would ultimately end up bringing to the table was far beyond what Dennis could have imagined. Gamma enlisted a 40-person crew, complete with an extensive lighting team, as well as significant high-end equipment.
This included cranes to lift the massve Arri S360-C light panels Gamma provided, a massive boon that Dennis had only previously experienced on his Netflix crew work for Valhalla, and on the Ridley Scott film The Last Duel. These are Arri's biggest lights - the size of a car - and signalled to Dennis that this shoot was going to be serious business. Three cherry picker cranes would be used to put these lights into place.
What justified such cinema-standard lighting? Well, the concept of the film required the shoot to be done entirely at night, with an entire historical village being lit up. Ambitious wide shots of 30+ people running through this heritage site would be required, and the equipment had to live up to this bold vision.
Andrew further surprised Dennis with the Arri Alexa 35 camera, brand new at the time, to shoot the project. No, let's correct that; Andrew provided TWO of these cameras for the shoot. Dennis would use one in handheld - a dream for this up-and-coming cinematographer - while the second would be operated by crane. To boot, Gamma provided a set of Atlas Lens Co's Orion Anamorphic lenses, allowing for cinematic potential that Dennis could only dream of.
As the final pièce de résistance of Gamma's stunning equipment offering for the project, Andrew brough alone a TechnoCrane, a high-speed, motorized, 7-meter-plus crane that allows for the camera to move from a high angle with incredible speed. This was a filmmaker's playground.
Zombie-ing in Style
Key to this project were the zombies. Dennis and the creative team were set on having a male model to play the lead role, which would require an incredible committment: the lead model would have to be seated for 7 (!) hours in the makeup chair. This is before a potential 10-12 hours of filming. A hard sell for anyone, except for the one man who stepped up to the plate: Dennis' father, Hazem.
Enlisted for the VFX makeup itself was Taraneh Sedeghi, who is an expert on Hollywood-standard SFX and costume design. Her work required two large trailers and an assistant, to ensure that each of the 30+ extras, in zombie makeup, with blood on their face, looked perfect in every shot.
For costume design, the team brought in Fabiana Lolli, who had to get something like 40+ sets of shirts and jackets, and rip them up to create the rough zombie look required. No easy feat, but she pulled it off in style.
An anecdote Dennis found particularly funny when reminiscing on the project was that of the food. Naturally, catering for such a large cast and crew was a colossal undertaking, and something that Dennis had never dealt with before on this scale.
"I remember my Nissan car filled with food, filled with water. In the first two hours [of the shoot], we ran out. So we sent Sid (who was doing BTS) to a grocery store to pick up as much bulk food and water as possible. He came back...and it was gone within an hour. So we had to send three of the guys back out to all fill up their cars with as much food and water as possible, just to get through this shoot." - Dennis Chehade, Founder of HyperJump Productions
At the time, Dennis didn't understand the scale of working with so many people, but it served as a valuable logistical lesson that has stuck with him ever since. Without all of these people, their hard work and resilience, such an ambitious project would not have been possible. HyperJump is beyond thankful towards each and every person involved.
For his part, Andrew also helped the shoot logistically by providing a massive trailer with bathrooms, as well as a trailer for the models to relax in between takes. All of this led to an eye-watering bill at the end of the day, but it's one HyperJump and Gamma were willing to foot in the pursuit of making something so spectacular.
But Andrew's involvement wasn't purely logistic, he also brought a committed creative partnership with Dennis, leading many of the key ideas and shots that would be central, including coming up with a Bad Boys-style parallax shot that Dennis is particulalry fond of. "A money shot", Dennis calls it.
Action-Packed Cinema
Andrew also helped enlist stunt specialist Amr Mcgyver to advise on the action sequences in the film. For one of the scenes, Dennis wanted one of the characters to be grabbed by a helicopter and taken away.
"So [Amr] brought a crane, but a specialized crane that sticks out and has a rope and then can pick up someone and lift them off. And what happened was, it was too slow. So he was like, let's rig him up. And let's have three guys on the top, jump off and then pull the rope at the same time so we can lift them off even faster. So we started building these, like, wheelies, and all of these like specialized sort of systems and all of that to make it go super quick and super effective." - Dennis Chehade, Founder of HyperJump Productions
It was unlike anything Dennis had experienced before, like a proper Hollywood film set. This effect was compounded by the inclusion of Abood Morad, an experienced gaffer with Netflix experience, whose expertise helped bring the project to the next level.
Abood taught Dennis a lot about lighting scenes to a professional standard, including one lesson that stands out to him to this day. When lighting a scene, Dennis would previously focus on lighting each individual shot, moving the lights with the actors. But this wasn't conducive to such a large cinematic production. Instead of lighting the cast individually, it was essential to light the entire scene first, creating a space in which the cast and camera could roam free.
"He told me, Dennis, this is a scene. We light the scene, we light the environment - you're not lighting people anymore. When the camera comes around [for the next shot], you need to be able to roll around. This is not a commercial, it's not a corporate video. This is cinema. It has to feel real...It really woke me up. Films aren't supposed to be clean, not supposed to be always perfect. They have to feel dirty, lived-in." - Dennis Chehade, Founder of HyperJump Productions
Also essential was the Production Designer and Art Director, Anna Shpaltakova, who brought on-set experience from Hollywood films such as Furious 7 and Star Wars: the Force Awakens. She had just wrapped working on the second Dune film (she would go on to work on Part Three as well), where she was in the props department, and she brought a huge amount of vision and wisdom, intent on making the film set feel like a real-life Call of Duty map.
Bringing numerous references from the game as well as real-life modern warzones, Anna added more than a touch of authenticity to the mise en scène. A key idea of hers was to bring in the iconic red barrels, an important element from the games themselves which would serve as a visual cue to any Zombies fan watching the film.
It was amazing having someone immersed in the world, constantly trying to breathe life into it. It's a nice location, [Anna] would say, but we need to integrate things from the games to make it feel real to the fans. Even the wooden planks against the windows that the zombies rip off, were a nod to the games that she came up with. She really went above and beyond to bring realism and value to this project. - Dennis Chehade, Founder of HyperJump Productions
Post-Production
Wrapping up such an ambitious, high-energy project required a visionary post-production team, and Yusuf Ramzan and Post Fusion answered the call. Yusuf would prove to be a "genius", in Dennis' own words, at managing the post team, helping to build the narrative and overseeing complex VFX work. This included significant work to fix the sky to make the nighttime feel consistent, which involved a hefty amount of rotoscoping and intricate color grading. Dennis was blown away at how efficiently Yusuf and the team handled this.
Yusuf brought a high level of detail at every stage. As an example, the glowing eyes of the zombies, that was all him, and ended up being an iconic element of the video. As with the other departments, Yusuf and his team went above and beyond to bring value and immersion to the final video.
The Result
After all was said and done, Dennis, Andrew, the cast and the crew created something that impressed the client, made waves online, and brought immense pride to the team.
For Dennis, it was a stark lesson on just how much is required to make a production of such a high level, of all the moving parts that goes into Hollywood-level filmmaking. The logistics, transporting all of the people, managing food, rest, and hot weather conditions - there were so many factors that had to be considered. With the immense help of Andrew and the Gamma team, it was a childhood dream fulfilled, over one very, very intense night of filming in the Ras Al Khaimah desert.
As the HyperJump Instagram would later declare, "the dedication, creativity, and professionalism of the entire crew made it possible to deliver a film that lives up to the scale and excitement of the Call of Duty universe."
The project would end up being a great success for PLG, Activison, and PlayStation, leading to a second HyperJump collaboration with Call of Duty for a global campaign. Stay tuned for the deep dive on that one as well!
Have a project you’d like to talk to us about? Contact us now at hyperjump@hyperjumpproductions.com or at (+971) 058–599-8064.
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