What does an average day at work look like for you?
I work exclusively on our trailers (we have separate animation teams for in-game and marketing purposes), so my average day can vary wildly depending on what stage of a trailer we're currently at. At the beginning of a dev milestone period we'll have a sit down with art, design and marketing to determine what the trailer requirements are for the upcoming release. Based on those requirements I'll sit down with the rest of the trailer team and we'll come up with one or two approaches to how we can best visually show off the upcoming updates.
After people have either told me that my ideas stink or that I'm a genius, we'll then start storyboarding/blocking out the rough shots that will make up the flow of the trailer. Once we've got some rough scenes laid out, I then hover over Alex Bowden (our video editor) like an extremely sweaty but friendly helicopter until he cuts us a rough edit that we can show to Chris Gregory (Art Director).
Upon approval, we'll then work into the edit and animate each scene fully (or capture gameplay footage where possible). This is where the bulk of the trailer production time is spent. Because we work a lot with the engine (hand animated scenes are still run and captured in-engine), we'll sometimes be nagging a very accommodating programmer or two to help us out with any bespoke tools or technical wizardry that we need to pull off our scenes. All the while we're constantly chucking edits to our very talented audio team so that they can compose to the visuals.
It's a great role because it's both creatively and technically challenging. I'm very lucky in that I get to interact with the many different departments and disciplines in the company, whether its art, design, programming, visual effects, audio or marketing.
What aspect of the game have you worked on that you are most proud of?
I came across onto the project in December '14 (I previously animated the Damocles trailer a few years back but then swanned off to work on Zoo Tycoon).
Since then I've worked on every trailer from 1.1 onwards. I'd say the slow-mo GDC trailer is probably the closest trailer to my heart. I had the idea for the trailer after mucking about with some debug commands and inadvertently slowing the build down to 0.01% of its normal speed. I then got excited and composed a few frozen battle scenes which seemed to go down well with the art & marketing departments. We then turned it into a full trailer from there.
Stylistically it's very different to our other marketing material, and the nature of how it started as well as the way the final product turned out means it will always be special to me. Special mention also has to go to the Powerplay trailer as that was a hard one to concept and lay out in a readable way.
What's your favourite thing about Elite Dangerous?
A few things:
- Its a small pleasure, and you end up seeing it a lot, but I will always find the hyperspace tunnel impossibly cool.
- The game looks beautiful all on its own, which really helps me out when composing shots!
- Finally, the size. The idea that there are vast corners that players (and devs) might never see. What could be hiding out there.......?
What was the biggest challenge you came up against during game development?
Definitely the Powerplay trailer. It's such a complex system in itself, so trying to condense the themes of Powerplay into an exciting 2 minute trailer was a headscratcher. We always try and keep our trailers as punchy and concise as possible, so Alex B and I had a tough old time trying to efficiently get the message across.
In more specific terms, the trickiest thing to pull off visually was probably something that most people didnt give a second thought, which was the timelapse of the station at the end of the 1.1 trailer. I think that one shot involved a 10,000 frame animation and a lot of patience.
What have you learned from working on Elite Dangerous?
That it's got some incredibly passionate fans.
Federation, Empire, or Alliance? And why?
Feds, because they have the coolest capital ship (gotta love that trench down the middle).
Tell the community a fun fact about yourself.
I was born on Friday the 13th, which explains a lot.
If you could ask the community one question, what would it be?
What's been your favourite trailer and why? What would you like to see more or less of in our future video output?
Answer his question on the forums here!