Currently the darlings of the CG Game Trailer world after stealing the title from Blur Studio, Digic Pictures have just released their latest reel. Although only containing a handful of updates from their 2010 version, this video shows that they owned pretty much every CG Trailer you got excited about in the last few years.

A long video, and relevant only for pre-rendered cinematics due to the high-res nature of many of their challenges, but this cinematics panel from Blizzcon 2011 hammers home the importance of reference gathering for top-level animation.

This trailer passed me by at E3 this year, but knowing Square’s Visual Works of Final Fantasy fame were involved makes it deserving of another look. Nice comparisons between animatics and final comps. Skip to around 1:15 to get past (at least some of) the Irish marketing man.

I took the time this last week to put together a reel of my work on Mass Effect 2, done between late 2008 and early 2010. Look below for a full shot breakdown, and, because you’re gonna ask, the music is Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy. Shot Breakdown Below is a breakdown of what [...]

Everyone’s talking about it so it would be rude not to post that the new trailer for Rockstar’s (Sydney-based team Bondi’s) L.A. Noir dropped yesterday and the facial performances look fantastic. Using Depth Analysis’ MotionScan technology, they appear to be going all out to capture the performances of apparently over 200 characters. While the visual [...]

Once again, the Japanese Softimage site has posted information on another showpiece title – and they spend a heavy amount of time talking about how Softimage interfaces with Motionbuilder. This is encouraging for me as I’ve decided to dive fully into Motionbuilder for my current project after finding it to be the most rounded solution for [...]

The Mocap Club has posted an interview with Uncharted 2 Cinematics Lead, Josh Scherr on the mocap process for the game’s high quality cinematics, complementing the videos on the subject included with the game. Some technical insights towards the end, but most interesting of all is the emphasis placed on the human side of the [...]

Due to the heavy reliance on video examples it was insufficient to simply post slides of the session I gave at the Montreal International Game Summit in November, so here is the full write-up outlining a proposal for a different approach to cutscenes as a form of delivering cinematic experiences in videogames. First, a little [...]

A few people at work have pointed me towards this audio interview I gave after the MIGS talk at the end of last year (a summary of which is still forthcoming, but you can see the slides here if you have a magnifying glass). If you can put up with the dodgy accent there may [...]

Today in North America – Friday in Europe. Go pick it up for Xbox or PC! This is the launch trailer, and I count some 75% of the shots here were done by the Montreal Cinematics team. So far the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, but I still nervously await the ultimate litmus test – [...]

With two weeks to go from today, I thought I should plug that I’ll be speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit, with the talk entitled Cinematics Sans Cutscenes. Here is the abstract: Cutscenes are a divisive subject amongst videogame developers. We rely on them as a relatively production-safe solution for imparting exposition and story [...]

“I normally don’t give guns to little girls, know what I’m saying, I usually give something else, but you know hey, don’t tell anyone I said that…”

This week is all about E3, and this time it’s going back to the way it should be – all loud noises, special announcements and awesome presentations on a world stage. We released a preview video some weeks ago which will forever be known internally as “the one with Parrish’s moustache”, but I wanted to [...]

Despite a clearly phoned-in voice over, Fox News’ Gamers Weekly has posted a video highlighting Resident Evil 5′s use of a Virtual Camera in the production of its cutscenes. This technique has intrigued me for some time, though equally interesting was the section showing the realtime feedback on the fully skinned and textured ingame characters. [...]

In December over on the Left 4 Dead blog, Valve’s Jason Mitchell posted an insightful look into the making of the Left 4 Dead intro movie, arguably some of the best acting and cinematics done to date in videogames. It appears to have been an incredibly iterative process, with the animatics rigourously playtested in the [...]

This, the final talk I’ll post from GDC’08, centred on the development of the first company-wide technology platform (or engine) for Square Enix. Despite the heavy tech-focus, this was the largest lineup I attended at the conference due to the chance of gleaning any information from these Japanese RPG masters. Square Enix: The Technology of [...]

Next up, in the first of three animation-related GDC ’08 presentations giving us an insight into modern-day Japanese game development, here are my notes from the Postmortem of Feelplus’s Lost Odyssey, one of two Japanese RPGs created exclusively for the XBOX360 under the watchful eye of Microsoft Game Studios and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. [...]