Game Anim is back online after a one-month hiatus due to being hacked. The timing was especially bad as it came at the same time I discovered Minecraft, but I’ve finally found it possible to tear myself away for an afternoon to get everything cleaned up. Regular service will return in the near future just as soon as I finish building Châteua Cooper.
Update: The castle isn’t finished. It’s never gonna be finished…
Those of you not visiting via a feed reader will notice that the site has undergone another of its annual facelifts, though this time the occasion is significant for two reasons:
First of all, this May marks the 5th anniversary of maintaining this blog. When I first started I wrote under a pseudonym as the internet then was a place where only undesirables went. I wished my person and place of work to remain anonymous, but now the world has caught up with social media and even your grandmother has a facebook account. The new design should better fit in this age of apps and community, and I expect to have more time to share as updates have been light on the ground for the last while due to my being otherwise engaged…
Secondly, for the last month or so I’ve taken on the fulltime role of “Internation Man of Leisure”, awaiting a work visa after leaving BioWare for a second time, being fortunate enough to have been recruited to join the early stages of one of Ubisoft Montreal’s flagship series’ next major outings. All this so instead of my talk of a new form of cinematic narrative being purely theoretical I now have the opportunity to put it into practice, and I look forward to sharing more on the project in the coming years – after just one week I know it’s going to be big.
I’ve just been messing around with the site, making it a little more easy to find the posts most interesting to developers that may find their way here and have dropped my last showreel onto the About page, so incase you missed it here it is.
This is the reel I made in January/February 2007 to land a job in Montreal so is a little dated. Featuring the second of three Commander Shepard models, (with crossed eyes no less ;-), it also contains the player navigation actions before the final level of polish, but enough excuses.
Continue reading for the full shot breakdown:
Phew. It’s around 1.30am and I’ve just finished uploading the latest theme for the site, doing away once and for all with the busy-ness of yester-year. I’ve been taking a graphic design nightclass lately and have been feeling creative, so now I can get back onto other projects.
In other news, I’ve begun to really move forward with my Canadian Residency application. This does fall short of full citizenship, (the main difference being I’ll still be unable to vote), but I should finally be able to pick up one of these fine accommodations that still seem to be very affordable in Montreal once my “Johnny Foreigner” status has been removed.
So, the third major overhaul to this site arrives today, along with something of a change of delivery.
The first and most obvious change is visual. This was inspired by the upcoming Apple iPhone, and the entire site has been formatted to work with the dimensions of the screen based on the initial movies and specs found on this site. Whether the thing takes off or not, I’m sure you’ll agree that everything is much more legible and easier to naviagte now.
The entire site has been migrated over to a wordpress-powered blog, with the main reason of the database functionality allowing for much easier cataloging. Previously, gameanim.com was created by hand in Dreamweaver, with all links and media updated by hand – which began to be such a pain in the ass that updates were difficult when I was busy elsewhere.
The second major change, (and one from which there is no turning back, based on the consistent hits from whois.com every month), is as you may have just noticed, I’m no longer writing in the third-person. This was always an admittedly cowardly approach to writing by hiding behind a pseudonym, which was mostly serving to provide a critical commentary on industry and animation free from any attachment to employers’ public image, (though the footer below still stands). The reason for this change of heart is twofold. Firstly, to change the emphasis of this site away from humorously poking fun at amateurs via “Bad Walkcycles”, and secondly: see below…
I’ve had several overhauls in my life recently, moving away from my previous job as Lead Animator on BioWare’s Mass Effect in Edmonton, Alberta, and moved to the opposite side of Canada to live with my girlfriend, Marie-Jo, in Montreal. We had been doing the long-distance relationship thing for almost a year while awaiting the finishing of the Mass Effect project, and as soon as the animation was in a state fit to leave, I did.
Aside from freeing me up to write about more personal thoughts and events in my life from here-on in, I’m hoping that sharing what work I actually have done should give the game animation-related opinions expressed on these pages a little more weight. Please check the About section for the full rundown on who I am and what I do.
Though he despises sites that do this, the alsoran musty concede to join the ranks of those that post about not posting. For the last several months his current project has been taking precedence over all artistic endeavours. Very soon, however, that is all set to change as he pursues a new challenge in the next stage of his North-American adventure. Expect gameanim.com to become reborn soon…
Updates are scarce right now due to the site being in the process of transferring over to WordPress. Aside from allowing RSS feeds whenever a new Bad Walk Cycle is posted (along with a possible ratings poll), the main reason for this is so that it doesn’t take about 1 hour to make even the slightest addition to the site.
Nearly one year after its initial launch, the alsoran is proud to release the first major overhaul of the content of the site. A new menubar for easy navigation of the complete site contents has been added along with a general streamlining of the image-creation process. The single largest feature though is the addition of a popup media-viewer, enabling much easier browsing of the available bad walkcycles – enjoy.
The alsoran has added his own personal mandate for this and other projects. Check it out in the about section to see if it fits in with your own…
Jonathan Cooper is Animation Art Director at Ubisoft Montreal. His games include Assassin's Creed III, Mass Effect 1 & 2, and more...
