In 2006 I started developing a short computer generated film called 'Devils, Angels and Dating'. This film was made with the internet in mind, fully aware of modern trends. I was inspired by modern dating trends and let those themes influence the core ideas behind the film.
This Television advert for the Singapore Navy was an interesting piece of work. The brief was; the buildings come to life and head out to sea to engage in battle with office themed projectiles, we then cut back to a man waking up in his office before we see the tag lines.
During the development of 'Devils, Angels & Dating' I knew it was going to be very important to create a strong trailer to attract talent to work on the project. So the trailer was planned out early in the process. Storyboards from the film were cut together and a score was created so that we could plan around those shots getting done first. It was updated almost as often as the main film itself so that the team could see how it was coming along. It was completed about six months ahead of the completion of the final film.
There were plenty of animatics created that dug into the story elements of the game with characters that actually needed to have performances, but this was probably the first one that I made with full animation. Previous to this all the FMV work had been cheated comic book style (semi-animated) scenes or the evolve scenes that were more spectacle than performance...
This group shot plays under the Title/Start screen and shows off all the characters the player can play. It went through many iterations over the years...
Funnily enough this sequence was originally conceived for the purposes of a trailer. Nick and I (our concept artist and a past animator) both felt strongly that it was time we did an advert that eluded to the story of the game rather than just quick cuts of the gameplay. So after a meeting about what we wanted, I designed this idea of seeing mini pivotal scenes from throughout the story glimced briefly in the clouds before the camera sweeps down to the castle below to start showing off the characters in action. It was enormously effective and ...
The magnum-opus of the entire game. This huge sequence had to top everything you'd seen, push the capabilities of Kameo beyond what you'd previously experienced, draw together numerous story threads, introduce a twist in the plot and give the player a satisfactory ending. It was developed towards the end of the game's development so was under pressure to be completed fast and there were other...
All the Evolve scenes were very complex pieces that required a lot of R&D, but they presented fantastic opportunities to do something imaginative. The only rules were that it had to start with the baby monster and it had to transform into the adult monster, ideally through a method that reflected their elemental theme. I've included an earlier version of this Evolve cinematic developed for the original Xbox. I later decided to upgrade all the FMVs to HD resolution at the same time as changing the characters to match their new Xbox 360 designs.
Panda Pander gathered a few million hits at Crackle before they changed their format. After Two Face Tabby I didn't want to spend so long on my next project so I did some one off exercises to flesh out my showreel while I spent a few months developing the pre-production material for Panda Pander (working title "Shelf Life").
Like all the evolve scenes Flex was a unique problem. He had to look like water and be completely malleable. So this required looking into water and water shaders, and some hand painted frames to blend between elements. There was another water themed scene, but I've not included it here because I only did a polish job on the effects and final look of it and the animation was done by Neil. Both scenes turned out pretty well though and I was lucky that they didn't change too much when the rest of the characters were being updated (spikes wouldn't have looked good on water!). Here's the animatic for the Flex scene.
This was a scene that was initially worked on my my friend Neil, but when we decided to revamp all the cut-scenes for the Xbox 360 Neil had moved onto another team. So I polished up the first half without changing too much and started the second half again from scratch. The original version was done at a time when we were taking a lot of shortcuts as part of the style of the scenes, but we'd taken all the other scenes a lot further and it was time to do something equally impressive for this.
This was one of the more imaginative characters in the game. Unfortunately after this cut-scene was finished the character proved too hard technically to implement in the game and we were beginning to realize we didn't need so many characters so he got the chop. But this scene was made available to view as an unlock-able extra (along with the animatic below) and featured in some of the early trailers for the game.
This deleted sequence started life like most of the others as an animatic. But at this stage storyboards and animatics were fairly new to the team and they liked them so much they thought we didn't really need to do any animation. This wasn't initially a popular decision with the animators but ...
I originally created the Snowman Evolve scene with a more snowball like theme but as the character designs all changed this scene had to be updated as well. All the characters were generally made to look more detailed and aggressive, mostly through the addition of bumpy surfaces and spikes. In this particular case I actually preferred the original 'Snowman' design and I think he lost his snowball qualities in the update. So you can see both the final and the original versions here, along with the animatic I originally story-boarded below.
After the two large Skylanders projects had been completed the small team of staffers left at Panda Panther turned to creating some new showreel pieces for the company reel. They'd recently bought a motion control camera rig to shoot stop-motion elements. We moved it from one New York basement to ...
This started with a mythical legend I researched that I have completely forgotten now. My old friend Scott helped me find it, he's good with things like that. The legend formed the basis for the story and provided the name of the beast: Fenrir. The I didn't make any attempt to retell the legend, I just borrowed the idea for the characters and formed my own story from them in a similar setting. My plan for this was ambitious so I never actually managed to completely finish it. Some of the scenes are lacking ...
During my last summer holiday as a University student I found a local company that built and sold video editing suits, they were also the UK distributors for a number of different pieces of software. I approached them, pitched some ideas and I was asked to do some animation for a video that would showcase and demonstrate the basics of an animation coloring system...
This was really just a cheeky last minute request to do an advert for BIT (the same company that commissioned me to do the Archer demo). I used one of the characters (later to be nicknamed Polo) from the Archer piece ...
