To bring the game’s eternal conflict of good versus evil to life, we created a massive, hand-painted battle on the vaulted ceilings of an historic church.
We needed a mind-blowing location for our fresco, and the painting couldn’t be just a piece of concept art. We needed real brush strokes, real canvas, and centuries-old techniques from a master of the Baroque style. The result was arguably the world’s largest art project of the year, transforming an ancient church into a larger-than-life shrine to Diablo.
Abandoned churches in New Orleans. Cursed chapels in the Italian countryside. Graffiti-covered altars in Lyon. All possible scenarios, but our hero was discovered in France, in the town of Cambrai.
We built up support of both the town and the French government, working in secret through Fall and into freezing Winter weather to pull off the daunting work. With its cavernous interior and 60-foot ceilings, no image could do justice to the sheer scale of the location. Lacking many of the basic necessities of a more modern building, this 300-year-old behemoth had an average interior temperature of 24-30º Fahrenheit, few lights, and zero WiFi. Absolutely perfect for what we needed to do.
Adam Miller, a Florence-based Baroque painter and instructor, leading a team of six artists, working 30 days straight on 24 vault panels, a 40-foot high wall scene, and an enormous dome to serve as the pièce de résistance. The effort of dozens of people and multiple teams on separate continents formed the backbone of a shoot for the Diablo IV teaser trailer.
How to best use the architecture of the church to create an intense battle against the forces of Hell, all while staying true to the world of Diablo through the lens of a Baroque mural.
Renaissance style poses and dramatic lighting captured the epic journey of the game’s heroes, across the ceiling vaults. A climactic battle on the rear wall leads up towards the final showdown with the demonic Lilith on the lofty dome. Each panel tells a story as the battles intensify, facing off against hideous creatures and the hordes of hell. Adam and his team spent many weeks posing and lighting specialized 3D models of the game’s five character classes within LIDAR scans of the actual church space. This arduous process allowed us to design every inch of the paintings ahead of time, before the manual process of painting every piece by hand got underway.
From location to paintings to film, executing on a massive scale was of the utmost importance to the heart of the idea. We had to think BIG, spitballing ideas on how to shoehorn what would have been years of work for some of the masters like Bosch or Michelangelo into a little over a month.
Master artist Adam Miller and his team of painters devised a breakthrough technique blending spray paint and acrylic paint to pull off this incredible volume of artistic work in record time. Working for 30 straight days, in 30 degree Fahrenheit temperatures in the church posed numerous challenges and creative problem-solving for our entire team from start to finish.
Each of the ceiling paintings had to be painted on canvas, stretched and mounted for painting before it was installed into the ceilings. While we would have loved to have painted directly onto the ceiling, we didn’t have the luxury of a years-long timeline. The finished canvases were attached to custom wood frames built directly into each ceiling vault, sized to fit with the help of our 3D LIDAR scanning for proper dimensions.
Due to the extreme height of the ceiling, specialized spider lifts that could reach the top as well as fit through the church doors had to be shipped in for the painstaking installation process.
Custom scaffolding was built allowing the fabrication of a rear wall prepped for direct painting to depict the final battle scene and a massive dome structure was built to be installed into the top of the church’s altar, housing our climactic confrontation.
Voiced by Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance, the short film reveals the epic paintings on the ceilings, the massive battles on the back wall and the climactic conflict on the ceilings dome in incredible fashion.
As part of the Beta launch of the game, players who reach level 25 with any class in the Diablo IV Open Beta will be entered for a chance to have their face painted inside the walls of the Cathedral of Diablo.
