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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]

In the last few weeks I’ve been getting out to a handful of various presentations, beginning with the IGDA BioShock presentation and most recently a week-long film and videogame visual extravaganza at the 2007 Adapt Conference. Representatives from Disney, Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic and several high-profile game development studios were in town to share [...]