Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

First, a little bit of background about where I’m coming from. I’ve been working on games now for nearly a decade in a variety of both in-game and cinematic roles, with the in-game side mostly focussing on player control, cameras and animation-system design relating to gameplay, whereas the cinematic part is about pure art and storytelling, getting information across to the player in as efficient a manner as possible.

At the time of the presentation, our team was wrapping up the final stages of production on cutscenes for Mass Effect 2 and here’s an image of the wall behind my desk.

This was a deliberately blurred picture (so as to not give away any spoilers) of our workload as it stood, with only the last few bugs remaining and each of those lines there representing anywhere between 1 and 7 individual cutscenes, many of which we now know post-release were well-received cinematic experiences. However, with such a heavy history of in-game animation design, I feel that with games like ours and the recently released Uncharted 2 among others, we’re coming to the limits of where we can go with pure cutscenes in our games.

Uncharted succeeded with its seamless transitions into and out of cutscenes, as well as the sheer high quality of the characters and acting, and ours with the logic behind them that decides which sequences (and how) to play depending on choices. As animators, we didn’t know whether your player-character was male or female, what their face looked like, or who you’d brought along with you on your team, not to mention the myriad choices that you can make throughout the game that will determine the outcome of particularly climactic scenes. After this point I can see cutscenes only limiting our progress in terms of developing storytelling in games, so I’m interested in exploring alternative methods that will allow us to truly develop stories for our medium rather than continually within the pre-established constraints of film – which are essentially where cutscenes lie.

The Problems With Cutscenes

When researching this topic, I began by initially trying to define exactly what a “cutscene” is. I’m sure when we’re all watching one we can tell that it’s a cutscene, but we have had so many variations of them over the years that it’s difficult to define them in a pure sense. The first and most natural idea that springs to mind tends to be “whenever the camera cuts”, but this is not the case as we often have no cuts, particularly during “designer cutscenes” whereby the camera simply transitions to a location to show the relationship between the player and the subject.

Next is to assume that player control is removed entirely, but as we’ll see later there have been many attempts to include some level of interactivity during cutscenes that doesn’t detract from them being cutscenes. The creation method is irrelevant – we have different terms in the industry such as Cinematic Cutscenes, Designer Cutscenes, Ingame and Pre-rendered, but in the end what really matters is how the player perceives the result, of which length is a sizeable factor.

Below is a great example of a cinematic sequence from Resident Evil 4 that follows all the “rules” of what we typically consider to be a cutscene, but because of its short duration the player doesn’t consider this a cutscene, and instead just another cinematic moment that contributes to the overall feeling of the game being a cinematic experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Defining The Problem

As such, a better approach is rather than to define what a cutscene is, instead to define the problem, so hopefully we can concentrate on simply attempting to overcome the issue rather than arbitrarily abolishing cutscenes themselves which has been done in the past to greater and lesser degrees of success.

Control and choice is restricted, if not removed entirely.

One second the player is running around, making choices and personally involved in many aspects of how the story or adventure is progressing, then the next they are force-fed exactly what we as developers want them to see and experience. This is fundamentally against the nature of our medium, and greatly restricts their experience for the duration of the cutscene back to the levels of the older medium of film.

Cutscenes make a clear division between the gameplay and the story.

The visual difference between cameras (and often character fidelity) in gameplay and those for cinematic cutscenes negatively reinforces the fact that most of gameplay involves little to no story progression at all.

Cutscenes are opt-out.

Once a cutscene is triggered, often without the player’s consent or choosing, his or her only option is to exit the cutscene. This brings with it issues of missing important information after the point of exit, and more importantly highlights the fact that we have a major problem here. If we have a design element in our medium that consistently requires we add the option to skip it entirely, then surely there is something fundamentally flawed with some aspect of that element?

This brings me to the definition that cutscenes are essentially “Imposed Cinematography”, whereby we as developers wish to impose narrative or progression information required to continue, or to ensure that the player experiences a part of the game exactly as we wish them to. This is the heart of the conflict between developer and player where, unlike other older mediums, we perform best when we play to our strengths and require participation from the player rather than purely imposing our creative will upon them.

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

Housed within the downtown EA Montreal studio, a slowly growing team of highly talented animators and I are creating animations and cinematic cutscenes for the sequel to our 2007 project. This is a new kind of game development where we are working remotely while connected directly to the Edmonton servers and are in daily contact with the team there. This is all made possible with the help of the fantastic folks at EA Montreal with whom we share a studio space, and a dedicated support team on the Edmonton side.

Additionally, over half of the Montreal outfit is made up of other former Mass Effect team members having worked in the Edmonton head studio before – helping to ensure that rather than just a random selection of folks under the BioWare banner, we are maintaining BioWare’s culture as well as the same high standards to which we are held. This percentage is only set to increase as more and more make the transition from the main studio to this new team.

Now to the important part – we are currently looking for one final exceptional animator to join the team, as well as environment artists and level designers. If you believe you are up to the challenge of helping create one of the most focussed and ambitious RPG sequels of all time and are looking for a new and interesting take on game development, please visit the BioWare website at careers@bioware.com.

Additionally, after missing out on Console Game of The Year in 2007, Mass Effect is back in with a shot at Computer Game of The Year after the later PC release, though is once again up against some seriously tough competition. (UPDATE: Though it did pick up RPG of the Year – don’t want to sound like sour grapes). Congratulations this year must go to Dave for Prince of Persia and Jay and Laurent for Gears of War 2′s nominations.

Outstanding Achievement in Animation

• Castle Crashers – Microsoft Game Studios – The Behemoth
• Gears of War 2 – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• Left 4 Dead – Valve Software – Valve Software
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots – Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc. – Kojima Productions
• Prince of Persia – Ubisoft – Ubisoft Montreal

Outstanding Character Performance

• Gears of War 2 (Dom) – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• Gears of War 2 (Marcus) – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• LittleBigPlanet (Sackboy) – Sony Computer Entertainment America – Media Molecule
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Old Snake) – Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc. – Kojima Productions
• Tomb Raider: Underworld (Lara Croft) – Eidos/Warner Bros. Interactive – Crystal Dynamics

Computer Game of the Year

• Fallout 3 – Bethesda Softworks – Bethesda Game Studios
• Left 4 Dead – Valve Software – Valve Software
• Mass Effect – Electronic Arts – Bioware
• Spore – Electronic Arts – Maxis
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King – Blizzard Entertainment – Blizzard Entertainment

Click here to view the embedded video.

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:

2006 | Mass Effect | E3 Bar Conversation
Mocap direction
Cinematography
Facial/gesture system co-design
Artistic vision for dialogue scenes

2006 | Mass Effect | Mass Effect Animation Systems
Mocap direction
Mocap cleanup
Animation system design

2006 | Mass Effect | Mocap Pre/Post-Cleanup
Mocap direction
Mocap cleanup

2004 | Jade Empire | Mocap/Keyframe Cutscene
Mocap cleanup
Keyframe Animation
Cinematography

2004 | Jade Empire | Keyframe Cutscene
Keyframe Animation
Cinematography

2003 | NARC | Keyframe Ingame Animation
Keyframe Animation
Rigging
Modelling

Read at Mayerson on Animation:

“If you make a half hour TV show and a million people watch it, you’ve used up 500,000 hours of human life. If you make a feature and a million people watch it, you’ve used up two million hours of human life. There are only 8,760 hours in a year, which means that your TV show burns up more than 57 years of human life and your feature burns up more than 228 years of human life for every million viewers. These amounts are not trivial. We should all ask ourselves if we are providing value for the amount of the audience’s life we are using up.”

This got me thinking about the sheer amount of time that can be spent inside a game as opposed to a film or individual television show. Doing a little rough calculation on a large-scale game like Mass Effect:

• The last official figures, (pre-holiday season 2007), showed the game to have sold over 1.7m copies. That number has certainly increased since then, but we’ll stick with that for now in the interests of being conservative.
• We know that only under 20% of games are ever completed, (though I’m estimating that figure might be higher based on the targetted RPG user-base over the perhaps more impatient “Halo crowd”), plus this is a game that actively promotes muliple playthroughs. Again though, in the interests of erring on the conservative we’ll just stick to 20%.
• Depending on how the player decides to approach the game, a single playthrough can last anywhere between 5-6 hours and 30-40 hours, so let’s take an an average of roughly 10-15 hours per playthrough. (Additionally, the remaining 80% will likely have sunk a significant amount of time before hitting a wall, but we’ll leave them out for now).
• 20% of 1,700,000 is 340,000, multiplied by 10-15 gives a total of 3.4-5.1 million hours, or at least 388-582 years of human life spent inside the game-world.

That’s a shitload of time!

Just think what these people could have been doing to further the human race – discovering cures for cancer, solving global warming etc. Of course, there’s a lot to be said for downtime and escapism. Losing yourself on an asteroid hurtling towards a human-colonised planet certainly allows you to punctuate your presumably less (than that) exciting existence, but imagine if we could infuse our unique entertainment medium with the kind of education and exploration of the human condition that has been the staple of much less time-consuming entertainment mediums since inception. We really as an industry owe it to ourselves to provide some kind of cultural value to the people who are going to be investing time in our creations so that not only can they justify the time, but us our creations.

I’ve always thought Mass retained something of the same look as all the other games rendered in the Unreal 3 Engine, but perhaps we did manage to put our own stamp on it with little tricks like the grain filter and custom depth-of-field, (the DOF in the image above was Unreal 3′s default at the time). And if I wouldn’t love to make a game locked at 24fps with motion blur.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time they’ve run a cover story on videogame VFX, which is usually the territory of film and television only. Definitely a great step forward and some great recognition for the excellent work done by Shareef and the rest of the VFX team, even if they did kill the framerate throughout (and to a degree, post) production ;-)

New Look

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.

New Database

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.

Coming Out

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…

Change of Scenery

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.