Gaming Special: Spov

It’s a designer’s dream to create something that becomes part of the visual language, and Spov founder Allen Leitch has done just that with his clean, clear wireframe graphics for the games world’s biggest franchise: Call of Duty. He talks to David Knight about being flexible and bringing a serious aesthetic to the fun world of video games

If you have been anywhere near a games console in the past decade, there’s a good chance you’ll have relished the graphic ingenuity of Spov. In that time the work of this London-based company has graced some of the world’s most successful video games, including the Batman: Arkham… series, and Titanfall, the biggest-selling Xbox One game this year so far. But above all, Spov’s reputation is based upon its contribution to what is probably one of the greatest ever franchises in the history of gaming.

Since the very first episode in the Modern Warfare series, Spov has contributed to every title in the Call of Duty franchise – including World At War, Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops, Modern Warfare 3, and Black Ops II. In each of these iconic games – and in Advanced Warfare, the latest Call of Duty title, released in November 2014 – Spov has provided vital storytelling elements and screen graphics.

For some CoD games the company has also undertaken user-interface research – testing the look and feel throughout the game itself. For other titles, Spov has created compelling intro films and trailers. It’s all essential work to lure players into a particular game universe. Invariably, Spov invests these first-person shooters with a context and credibility that’s a key factor in their success.

Designer Allen Leitch officially created Spov in 2007, and has seen it grow from a one-man operation via a Shoreditch start-up to a Hoxton-based multifunctional concern in beautifully appointed canalside offices. (And in case you’re wondering, the name Spov is not an acronym, but a term that stems from Leitch’s hometown of Clydebank near Glasgow that apparently translates as something like ‘bullshit’).

Leitch’s partner in the company, managing director Dan Higgott, joined just over four years ago, when Leitch was no longer able to combine the tasks of marshalling teams of freelance animators on various jobs and actually running the company.

Last-minute noodling

Spov provides a variety of services for games developers, as a creative design company and a production facility. “The nature of our work is very flexible, and that’s why we’re valuable,” says Leitch. “We can still work on things and noodle away, right up until the night before it goes in its box if necessary.”

“With Call of Duty we tend to be involved at the beginning of the project – we certainly were with the two Black Ops games, where we were involved very early on with some R&D work,” Higgott explains. “But with Titanfall and Watch Dogs, for example – two very popular titles this year – both studios came to us when they had almost completed their games, because they wanted an intro movie, to contextualise what’s about to happen when you turn on the game.”

Watch Dogs, Higgott adds, was “very much a production job” as the client already had the script and art style; but Spov had far greater creative leeway with the Titanfall intro, pitching a new visual identity, to blend with the game story of mankind leaving Earth and colonising the solar system and beyond. They based it on actual footage from the Cassini-Huygens space probe mission to Saturn. “It immediately grounded it for us as a way of communicating exploration and space in a plausible way.”

Plausibility has been a key element to Spov’s work, and the cornerstone of the company’s success is a specific, very authentic-looking design aesthetic, that appears within the Call of Duty games – the swooping wireframe cutscenes, designed by Leitch himself.

Designing the future

The designer and animator studied industrial design in the late 1980s at Edinburgh’s Napier University, where he discovered he “was much more interested in how things looked than how they operated.” By the early 2000s he was working as a freelance animator in TV graphics, where his involvement in the hit Discovery Channel show Future Weapons opened the door to the world of video games.

“It was about guns that shoot round corners, that sort of thing – and was a big hit,” he recalls. “Then I got a call out of the blue from an artist at a games company who really liked the aesthetic in Future Weapons, asking if I’d like to work on their game. I said ‘Of course!’ At that point I had no concept that it was a big deal.”

The game turned out to be Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which became a phenomenon on its release in 2007, smashing sales records and heralding a new age of gaming on the latest consoles Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The impressive veracity of the game was partly due to the detailed wireframe graphics – a kind of inverted blueprint – of weaponry and other operational information, a style that Leitch had pioneered on Future Weapons.

“What [Call of Duty’s original developers] Infinity Ward had seen in Future Weapons was: here’s a way of telling these stories that feels serious, military, that isn’t superfluous but gets the information across,” says Higgott. “Modern Warfare was the first time these clear, clean, detailed, full-of-depth wireframe visuals had been used to tell stories in that way.”

A new visual language

Spov have evolved that visual language in subsequent Call of Duty titles, and Leitch and Higgott have just completed their work on the latest Call of Duty, Advanced Warfare, which features the voice and CG avatar of Kevin Spacey as the bad guy. “It was kind of a buzz, to see the work going around the v/o by an actor at the top of his game,” says Leitch.

The pair are sworn to secrecy about the game’s content but Higgott does reveal that “They came to us with an overall story and vision that was pretty much resolved. But they didn’t know what anything we were going to do would look like. We were totally immersed with them in deciding how we were going to visualise these stories.”

Spov has increasingly seen its trademark tech-heavy style become part of the visual currency beyond the world of games, replicated by others in movies and advertising. Higgott contends that the style has passed into common usage as a device to help tell serious stories about conflict in action-adventure movie blockbusters and other games.

“I don’t want to claim that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t done it. But I think it set a very strong stylistic guide that has been aped and developed by lots of games and films.”

Going commercial

Spov is now looking to make inroads into commercial production. Not unreasonably, Leitch and Higgott believe their expertise could be used beyond the video game industry. They are hoping to open new doors, with a particular eye on ads and are repped by Squire London. “The games business is great and, touch wood, will continue to be great for us,” says Leitch. “But I’ve been very keen to take our skillset into other industries. And the most obvious one is advertising.”

They’ve made a start. Spov has contributed graphics for a new online adidas ad out of TBWA, to be seen shortly. “It feels like a like a great opportunity for us,” says Higgott. “We want to broaden our experience and expertise, we want to be able to use what we’ve learned from a breadth of clients to help the other areas we work in – a kind of cross-fertilisation.” 

And for Leitch it could be new fertile territory in which to apply his solid design principles. “I’m passionate about my design background,” he says. “And good design is about defining the problem initially, then putting a team together to solve that problem. Whether it’s 2D or 3D, for me the process is exactly the same.”