Meet the Team

“

Nine mercenaries have come together for a job. It's the middle-ish part of a century a lot like the one we just had. A simpler time. There are three TV stations, one phone company, and two holding corporations that secretly control every government on the planet. Each corporation administers its half of the world with a multi-disciplined army of paper pushers. For any problem lacking an obvious bureaucratic solution, mercenaries like these are contracted to address the situation through a massive application of force. Now's your chance to Meet the Team. — Meet the Team Overview

”

The Meet the Team videos are a series of computer-animated shorts starring the various classes of Team Fortress 2.

Click on any of the images below to be taken to the appropriate Meet the Team page.

File:Meetthescoutbutton.png	File:Meetthesoldierbutton.png	File:Meetthepyrobutton.png
File:Meetthedemomanbutton.png	File:Meettheheavybutton.png	File:Meettheengineerbutton.png
File:Meetthemedicbutton.png	File:Meetthesniperbutton.png	File:Meetthespybutton.png

File:Meetthesandvichbutton.png

About the Meet the Team Series

The clips have their origins as audition scripts for the voice actors who played the likes of the Heavy, the Sniper and the rest of the characters in the game. The first video in the series, May 2007's Meet the Heavy, is almost word-for-word what Valve used to cast actor Gary Schwartz. The video was made on the heels of a Portal video used to promote the personality of that game. After the first short was released, Meet the Heavy, viewers praised both the quality of the animation and the humour of the script, likening it to productions by professional animation studios such as Pixar. Due to this highly positive reception, Valve announced plans to release a Meet the Team video for each individual class in the game, with possible side-features for items and non-player characters such as Meet the Sandvich. Only 'Meet the Medic' and 'Meet the Pyro' have yet to be released. Robin Walker has stated that the videos "tie in to the strategy we have with TF2 of continually updating the service ... it makes a lot more sense." "What the videos do is give ways for people who don't even have Team Fortress 2 yet to get some entertainment from the game. And that may turn them into TF2 players and customers." [1]

The videos were not released for promotional purposes and fan service alone but also influenced the game itself. Eric Wolpaw stated that "It helped everyone on the team get a little bit more in tune with who that particular character was, so we just kept knocking them out and they kept on being popular," An example of how the videos influenced the design of the game was the Sandvich, which according to Robin Walker "came almost directly out of the movie… We felt the movie had justified and created a way for us to have a 'Sandvich' in the game and have that action [of eating it] make any kind of sense in our game world." Jarate was also added into the game after it's appearance in Meet the Sniper.

The videos also helped the game's technology. Valve used Meet the Heavy to test the facial animation system the studio was developing for TF2. According to Walker, the new system "allowed our characters to have a much greater range of expressions than we were able to do in Half-Life… We wanted a test case for that." Ultimately, what they got to work in the Meet the Team videos is what would display for players running the game itself at its highest settings. Walker recalled that team's pleasure about "the expression on the Heavy at the end when he's shooting and screaming." It was no fake. "It wasn't this thing that the coolest bit in [the movie] was something that would happen in the game."

소스 영상 제작기

팀포트리스2의 "팀원을 만나다"는 레프트 4 데드의 시작영상처럼 고유 엔진을 적용해서 소스 영상 제작기로 만들었습니다. 그런 영상들을 만들 땐 사용자들로 하여금 자기 자신을 같은 스캔안에 여러번 녹화해서 마치 사람들이 많이 있는것처럼 합성하고, 거기다가 다양한 시네마틱한 영상과 모션 블루(모션 블루는 비록 빠른 움직임을 보여줄 때만 쓰이긴 하지만 필름 메이커처럼 게임 차제에 추가되어 있습니다)이나 심도 조절같은 효과와 기술들을 더합니다. 또한 제작기에는 팀원을 만나다에서 볼 수 있듯이 특수 고퀄리티 텍스쳐를 사용합니다. 밸브사는 이 제작기를 언젠가 공개할 예정이라고 합니다만, 유저들은 필름 제작기가 TF2 베타 파일에 들어있는 걸 확인했고 지금도 얻을 수 있습니다.

External Links

• Official Meet the Team Page
• Valve Dreams Of Team Fortress 2 Movie, Divulges 'Meet The Team' Origins