The Return of G4TV How Rainfall used C4D to create the viral teaser announcing the return of a beloved, nerdy network.

Fans of the much-loved cable network G4TV were sad to see their nerdy hub for gaming, comics and popular shows, like X-Play and Attack of the Show, come to an end in 2014. But, a few months back, G4 raised hopes by teasing a return with a 60-second video posted to Twitter with the message “We never stopped playing.”

Premiered online during Comic-Con’s 2020 livestream event, the teaser takes viewers through a dimly lit warehouse filled with mothballed G4 props and memorabilia. The camera stops in front of a black-and-white television where, on screen, an old-school game of Pong is mysteriously being played. Suddenly, the words “Incoming Transmission” appear, followed by G4” and “2021.”

Made by LA-based Rainfall, who collaborated with G4 for years when the network was still on the air, the teaser is packed with Easter eggs for the network’s fans. Rainfall’s Sam Balcomb and Mike Shaw served as directors, and relied primarily on Cinema 4D, After Effects and Unity, with sound design by Rainfall’s Jeff Dodson.

Fast forward to today and G4 has now made it official that the network will go live in 2021, featuring gaming, pop-culture shows and live events. Here’s what Balcomb had to say recently about Rainfall’s work on the teaser, as well as the studio’s collaboration with G4.

Balcomb: G4 was a very early client of Rainfall’s. We started working with them in 2009 when they got in touch after seeing some of our work. At first, we did a very silly Inspector Gadget kind of thing where all of these weird things happened to Kevin Pereira, the host of "Attack of the Show". But we worked with them for years on a lot of different things, like putting Olivia Munn and Eva Amurri into "Avatar" as Thelma & Louise and making ridiculous music videos.

G4 was all about having fun and everything was really silly. It was a shame when they closed. But then earlier this year I got a call from Mike Shaw, producer of "Attack of the Show". He said it was top secret, but that G4 might be coming back and could we put together an announcement video for Comic Con 2020. We immediately said yes.

Balcomb: We talked over a bunch of ideas. Everybody liked the idea of having a warehouse storing all of this stuff from the old shows. They were thinking of shooting live action but, with the pandemic, we suggested using Cinema 4D and they were fine with that. We’ve been using C4D since the start of Rainfall in 2008, and I’ve been happy to see it improve over the years and give artists so many tools to quickly make complex and good-looking renders.

The integration with engines like Redshift makes the process even faster. We used to maintain a larger render farm here at the office for big projects, but with a GPU-based engine, a single machine with a RTX 2080 TI was able to output the majority of the shots within a tight timeframe.

We wanted the warehouse to have kind of a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" feel, only more disheveled, so we went through a number of looks for that. With C4D and Redshift it was easy to get decent-looking renders out quickly. We put together a huge list of things to go in the warehouse, and then narrowed it down to objects that would be easily recognizable to fans, like part of a wing of a weeping angel from "Dr. Who" and Samus’ ship from "Metroid".

There’s also a folding chair that has “Hold for Jim C” written on it. It was the from the show where they had James Cameron come by for an interview. We built everything out in prefab clusters as we went, so we had a cluster of boxes, barrels, wires and film equipment that could be randomized and placed all around. We customized whatever was closest to the camera.

Balcomb: When G4 first launched, the very first thing they broadcast was a game of Pong, and it was the last thing they broadcast too. So that was a major thing they wanted to bring back with the teaser along with the idea that they’d never stopped playing. All these years the game has been going, so the score is in the millions now. They even had an exact set of scores they wanted to have on screen.

We have people at the studio who know Unity, and I’ve been playing around with it for a while now too, so I got the idea to create an interactive Pong game. We could have animated it all by hand, but we would have been locked into that animation. We thought it would be a lot more fun to have a working Pong game that we could customize perfectly and capture the exact moment we wanted. You think Pong is the simplest thing in the world, but actually getting the physics right was trickier than I thought it would be.

The Unity physics engine is, of course, vastly different from what the original programmers had to code from scratch, and has a lot of variables that weren’t applicable to Pong, such as friction and mass. It became more of a case of stripping out functionality that we normally take for granted to give it a retro feel.

The G4 launch was also preceded by an ARG experience that let website visitors play the game, so we worked in tandem with the client to make sure our game matched theirs. It took a day or two to complete to code. It was a good process of reverse engineering something that is so well known. We’ve done a number of projects where we had to create a VHS look, so we were able to capture a lot of VHS static and noise that you’d expect.

Balcomb: We degraded the image a bit to make it feel more retro. Nothing is too sharp or clean, and there are a lot of blues. We were going for a little bit of a Steven Spielberg/ Amblin Entertainment vibe. We had some 16mm film grain that we shot a number of years ago that came in handy too. We try not to use plugins for look emulation. We like to use custom-shot or designed assets as much as possible.

Balcomb: Making the teaser was such a fun project from start to finish. Everyone was great to work with, and they were so open to our ideas. We don’t always get that, and it was really nice to have that kind of open collaboration and be able to produce something that the client loved.