Another great Assassin’s Creed trailer from Digic. Took a little back-and-forth to get the jumping arrow shot looking good, but I feel they nailed it. Day one of E3 down and the team is in high spirits!
Archives For cinematic
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 I was responsible for in each scene. The terms used are as follows: Continue Reading…
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 progression, to give the player objective location information, and to reward achievement and successes like level completion. However, they cut more than just the camera. The flow, immersion, and most of all, interactivity uniquely enjoyed by the medium of videogames all take a hit for their (often unskippable) duration.
In their defense however, attempts to forego their inclusion can result in a weaker visual presentation and take us further away from an emotional connection with characters and story. Additionally, a quick scan of screenshots previewing upcoming games illustrates our growing reluctance as an industry to present titles from the in-game perspective, where cameras are rightly skewed towards gameplay.
This talk explores various techniques used by games over the years to create a cinematic look outside of the traditional reliance on cutscenes, with the pros and cons of each, finishing with suggestions on how these might be combined in the future to offer cinematic moments while keeping the player in the game.
Takeaway: Techniques alternative to cutscenes for imparting interactive story and cinematic moments in games.
Intended Audience: Game Designers, Writers, Animators and those involved in storytelling.
Should you be attending the conference please stop by at 2.45 on Monday afternoon. If at least one of my observations is taken onboard then we might just reduce our reliance on cutscenes for storytelling.
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. While it appears to be diffuse-only, this looks to be a small yet significant improvement.
[via Kotaku]
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.
Feelplus: Looking Back at LOST ODYSSEY – The Challenge of Cross Cultural Development
Ray Nakazato – President, Feelplus Inc.
As with each of the Japanese presentations, Nakazato began by detailing the hierarchy of the companies involved in the project. Feelplus Inc. was established in 2005, with the team quickly growing in size to the final headcount of around 100 developers, many of which came from Microsoft and SEGA. Feelplus is 1 of 3 companies under the AQ Interactive Group, (including Artoon and Cavia), and the project was a collaborative effort with Sakaguchi’s team at Mistwalker who formed the core desgin team.
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 work methods and techniques, for which I am all-ears, with the week ending on a high at the Halo 3 party, whereby I was fortunate enough to come home with a second copy of the game after beating a handful of Ubisoft animators into Slayer submission.
Over the next week I’ll be uploading my notes from the various lectures attended, (in no particular order), beginning with Bungie’s own Feature Presentation below:
Bungie: Creating Movie-Quality Cinematic Moments In Realtime
CJ Cowan & James McQuillan – Lead Producer and Cinematic Director on Halo 3
This talk was unfortunately beset with technical problems throughout, and as such many of the real-time editing features of their engine were unable to be demonstrated. It did, however, offer an insight into a company creating one of the most epic games ever with tools that were so technologically backwards it is amazing they managed to get anything out the door at all.
Despite this, they appeared oblivious to how outdated their systems on show were as they proudly demonstrated tools and processes that I’ve fortunately never had to endure in all my time in this industry. Perhaps Bungie is living in a bubble-shield?
