Hey guys! It’s been a while. I mean, it’s been a LONG while! I still have “Lockdown and Up Skill – Part 3” to do, and I’ve been meaning to do that for MONTHS!
But today I’m gonna talk to you about a different subject – how nice it is to see freelance projects get released!
Now it has always been a pleasure to see something I have worked on released into the wild, and see people’s reactions to it, be that good or bad. The fact of the matter is that either way, something has been released, and I was part of bringing it all together.
What has been interesting is, as a freelance animator who prefers the shorter contracts, I have seen a couple of projects released this year, rather than waiting years for one project.
In this post I will share what I can, and talk a little bit about my involvement in the project.
Gods Will Fall – Clever Beans
This is probably the project that has inspired this post. Released a couple of days ago, this is an announcement trailer for a project I worked on as a freelance animator for the first 6 months of the year.
I primarily spent that time animating bad guys, and these are pretty sick and twisted characters, each one with a unique style and backstory – I’m not sure how far in to the lore the game goes, but the game designer created a world rich with story and lore!
It was a fun project with different characters and therefore different challenges and opportunities! it has a very intriguing art style, and I’m looking forward to it’s release!
Hercules Journey – BlackBoard Studios
After working on a game where you killed gods, I worked on a this lovely project; an in-game promo for a casual game about Hercules!
The great and difficult thing about this project was that I was the only animator working on it! I had four weeks (FOUR WEEKS!) to pull this together from layout to polished animation!
Now, for me, that was quite the feat! I am really proud with how this has turned out. Sure, the story is a little cheesy, but it works for the target audience of the game, so that’s good. And the rendering that those guys did is incredible!
I have just finished a follow-up project for these guys. This time it was a total of 5 weeks work – good fun, but pretty full-on!
Godfall Combat Trailer – The Trailer Farm
Man, games today really push the ideas that men can triumph over gods, ey? Very greek indeed.
I had a couple of weeks between projects, and was ready to sit back and relax for a little while, when I got a call from the Trailer Farm. What they wanted literally slotted into the 8 days I had.
This was an interesting project, not like anything else I had done – taking in-game animation assets, laying them out and blending them together to be rendered super slow-mo for this trailer. I only worked on a couple of shots at the start of this trailer, and one of the shots was literally 7 frames long that would be slowed down in-engine for the render.
This, along side the already animated assets, made the project surprisingly difficult. There were a lot of restraints with what you could do with in-game animations. Sometimes what works in-game doesn’t work for cinematic trailers, but due to the nature of the trailer these assets couldn’t be messed with in any major way.
Still, for a couple of days work, it was a really interesting project with a great group of people!
Old Spice – Red Knuckle
This was another 4 week project, working with a small team of people to put together a Madden-style advert for Old Spice.
Now, I have always been a fan of the Old Spice adverts – they bring so much off-the-wall humour to their marketing, so this was a a really fun opportunity.
This time, we were given a bunch of mocap assets used in an American Football game that we needed to blend together and animate on top of.
For this project I found myself in more of a Lead role. I spent a lot of time working with the other animators, making sure they had the correct animation assets, applying the mocap data to the rigs and sending them over. I also felt, due to the quick turn around, that I needed to keep on top of the organisation of the team. After a couple of moments of pandemonium (some artists having too much work to do whilst others didn’t really know what to get on with), it was really important for me to know who was working on what shot at what point. I made real good friends with spreadsheets for this project!
As such, apart from some initial layouts of a couple of shots – and a centralised run-cycle animation asset for Derrick Henry for animators to work on top of – I only really took control of one shot. I bit the bullet. And spent a lot of time on the first shot.
As you can see, this shot has two American Football teams attacking each other! That’s like 22 high-poly characters aggressively interacting with each other. It was a nightmare of manipulating mocap data to fit the interactions, adding hand-keyed poses, and doing all of this across about 5 different Maya files as my machine at the time couldn’t handle everything at once!
It was a great challenge to overcome, and though it could be polished more, I am really happy with the shot I ended up with, all things concidering!
Further Projects
Needless to say, they year hasn’t ended yet, and there are more projects to add to this list. And I will do, as and when they arrive. But for now, this is all I can share, so watch this space for more of my work.
And I promise I will get round to doing the Lockdown and Up Skill Part 3 some point soon!
Cheers!
Oz
Oz Durose 