Click here to view the embedded video.

Shot Breakdown

Below is a breakdown of what I was responsible for in each scene. The terms used are as follows:

Animatic

Initial layout of the scene, covering loose camerawork and editing as well as rough posing on the characters to be used as reference for the mocap shoot.

Mocap

Once mocap is received, laying it down and re-editing the timing and cinematography to match, including an initial pass on facial. Often a lot of artistic changes are made at this stage so this forms the bulk of the work.

Polish

The final stage where the VO, facial and all the details such as fingers and contact points are finalised.

Off to a bad start, early in the year I came to the sad realisation that the BioWare Montreal studio I had devoted the better part of two years building and promoting was never to fully realise its ambition due to a variety of factors – all of which predicted by team members much more cynical yet clearly more incisive than I ever gave them credit for. Let me clarify that the studio is still a great place for juniors wishing to learn or seniors looking to be at least partially involved in a major AAA game series, but for myself there was no challenge commensurate with my own goals remaining there.

While putting out the majority of cinematic moments for what has been celebrated as one the best games of last year in Mass Effect 2, we’d amassed a cinematics team of the calibre I’m unlikely to ever find again. 5 of the 8 animators had been art or animation directors on previous AAA projects both inside and out of BioWare, and as such we were highly self-motivated and able to put together technically complex cinematics despite being over 2000 miles away from the core team in Edmonton. Unfortunately life imitated art and on this suicide-run of an adventure only 2 of the 5 survive at the time of writing.

So conflicted was I in my decision to leave this dream-team that following my first of several interviews at another studio I found to my horror I’d mistaken their washroom’s waste basket for a urinal as I wrestled with my thoughts. Thankfully no-one pinned the mess on me and I got hired regardless – just don’t tell anybody at Ubisoft, ok?

What followed were several weeks of relaxation and travel to my parents’ just-finished home in Cyprus in my self-proclaimed role as International Man of Leisure while I awaited the new work-visa to come through. (A word of advice – don’t quit your previous job before you have something new lined up no matter how frustrated you are – especially when as a foreigner you can be kicked out the country after just a few months). So now at the new job I’m having to start over and once again prove myself as a valuable team-member as is always the case when one makes a switch into unknown territory. I’d say this was a good period, but since leaving BioWare Montreal I’d been constantly accompanied by a lingering frustration as to what might have been, given the enormous potential that (perhaps) still rests with the fledgling studio.

This period of cautious optimism was short-lived however as, looking forward to our first summer together in 4 years uninterrupted by visitors, a cruelly ironic twist of my own foreign status and the long-distance nature in which we first met sent my then-girlfriend away to the UK to work for an indeterminate amount of time. This time became indefinite when after only a few weeks she decides she prefers living alone to living with me. What followed were several weeks of excessive drinking and strip-clubs as good friends did their best to cheer me up, which to a degree was surprisingly successful – reinvigorating a social-life static from years of coupledom and clarifying things when I discovered I was far more upset with my BioWare breakup than with the girl. The darkness remained though with the fact that I’ll never see my dog again (after 4 years they become like kids) and I had to go through the trouble of selling the condo we bought together, and do this all on my own. Then things got really bad…

Right before a trip to Poland for my friend’s marriage, (followed by a lonely yet reflective week in Paris booked before the split), I had the misfortune of flooding the kitchen via an overnight burst pipe. While I initially appeared to get off with minor damage, (both downstairs neighbours’ ceilings were ruined and were immediately forced to move out), on returning from Paris I found the entire wooden floor of my (recently listed for sale) condo to be warped in the extreme. A further investigation showed mildew to have permeated throughout under the floorboards so I was to spend the next 5-6 weeks jumping from 1-star hotel to worse while the place was repaired at the snail’s pace preferred by Quebecois floorers and road-workmen alike.

Now, with the insurance for hotels only paying out after the fact, and lack of access to a kitchen to cook my own meals causing an inordinate amount of eating out, these weeks, (and the several proceeding), were spent as close to the breadline as I have been since my student days, oftentimes leading to decisions as to what food I could purchase that would realistically avoid going without before the next paycheque. Add on to this an immediate fall into sickness and work demands calling for me to pull consistently long hours and one can imagine that this was certainly not a fun time and one that will definitely not be easily forgotten. Matters were made significantly worse by the realisation that selling so early on a mortgage so close after the financial collapse of the modern world would incur a penalty upwards of $20K, in turn leading to added stress for a potential future of debt to the bank on top of no longer owning property.

But, as things often do, several elements all came together at once at the end of the year to make me realise I am firmly past this hump in my otherwise fruitful Canadian adventures. It turns out that listing your property for sale then denying access to potential buyers for weeks on end due to vacating the premises builds up a certain artificial anticipation. That, coupled with brand new flooring throughout, created a flurry of competing viewings and offers all at once which were favourable enough to not only cover the mortgage termination penalty, but leave a little in my pocket to aid rebuilding my furniture collection. A promotion to Animation Director coincided with the completion of the heavy work deadline as well as the move into my new loft apartment to embark once upon the bachelor life I had lived back in Alberta, and before that in Scotland.

After a successful meeting at Ubisoft HQ in Paris in late December things are looking great going into the new year. Our project has been green-lit for production and we’re already strides ahead of where we should be at this stage so I intend on hitting the ground running as the team gradually pours back in after the holidays. Put in perspective, I realise it’s really not such a bad year as I still have all my limbs intact and these are all problems borne of being in such a fortunate position in the first place so I hope this rant doesn’t offend anyone. I just need to get that shit out as part of grabbing 2011 by the horns, and can’t wait to share all the amazing things we’re working on as and when the project is announced. Things are going quite ridiculously well outside of work as well, but this isn’t a blog on that kind of filth so I’ll just close by wishing everyone a great new year and good luck in all your various endeavours – artistic or otherwise. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this it’s that no matter how bad things get, it’s never as bad as it first seems when you must cut your losses, or have them cut for you.

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.

Montreal International Game Summit 09 – Blogcritics Interview

It covers a few points I missed out of the talk and some thoughts on ME2′s romance custscenes. Having a long enough break from the project I’m now playing through the game with fresh eyes, and seeing everything in context I’m most happy with the Thane romance but can only see the green guy on Youtube as I’m not playing female.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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 – the ever-critical girlfriend…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note the cool Mass Effect 2 N7 shirts I and a few others are sporting – just a shame it looks like such a sausage party…

Choice example at 1:35pm -  still as true as ever.

When I first began animating games at home in my highschool years and was invited up to the local game studio, DMA Design, back home in Scotland it was exacly at the time of the big shift from the 2D of the 16bit consoles (SNES and Genesis) to the impending 3D revolution of the as-yet unrealeased PlayStation and N64. I still clearly recall being informed by my tour guide (Art Director Oz, who by some strange twist of fate now works just up the road from me in Montreal at local studo A2M) that it would be “a long time before we’ll be seeing round edges in games again” with the move to hard-edged low-poly games like the original Tomb Raider and Tekken. As such, I promptly ditched my computer and all my 2D skills and instead decided to apply for art college to get drunk and meet girls.

On completing my studies and joining the industry proper it was 5 years later and the old-hands I learned from and I were wrapping our heads around the leap from the original PlayStation to the PlayStation 2, with its analogue input and superior power and memory specifications. During this period a lot of over-estimation of these specs on our part resulted in much trial and error, (with the latter being most prevalent), and the unfortunately disproportionate ratio of actual creative-to-technical work was quite the learning experience. But hey, I didn’t know any better…

4 years later and I make the jump across the Atlantic. After a brief stint with the Xbox, it’s on to the Xbox360 (at the time, known as Xenon) and the then unfinished Unreal 3 engine. Again, lots of over-estimation of hardware specifications despite being some of the first developers to receive the new hardware kits and being the UE3 early-adopters. Again, having to relearn how to create animation in games from scratch as we apply new methods such as blending, additive animation, IK and an entirely new facial system, not to mention the poor artists who had to completely rethink their workflows with the move to normal maps and Z-brush modelling.

So here we are once more. 5 years later and on the verge of when another hardware generation cycle is expected to be announced, so I’m going to put it like this…

Can you imagine how crippled the art of filmmaking would be if every time shooting starts the vast majority of the crew’s time is spent creating reels of film and re-designing how it works inside the camera? If every time an author sits down to work on his or her next bestseller they must first spend years establishing workflows for simply getting the words down on the page? And every new album is delayed months as your favourite band is holed up in the studio, luthering their own guitars?

For the first time ever I’m coming into work and purely creating art. Not worrying about whether I’ll get the tech in time to finish the workload. Not dealing with crashes, bugs, delays and instead just knowing that when I want something to work, it does. For the first time in my career I’m spending 100% of my day creating mature, thought-provoking content, and it’s really something of a marvel to be discussing character motivation and story arcs safe in the knowledge that everything else is taken care of.

To this end you can keep your new hardware and your fancy camera inputs and magic wands, because I’m concenrating on content.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Virtually all of the cutscenes in both videos were done by our team here in Montreal, so a special shout out to the hard work of the guys both here and in Edmonton, and Parrish’s moustache.