These are computer game cinematics. The first three are from "X-Wing versus TIE Fighter: Balance of Power", a Lucasarts game. I built and textured every single model that you see, learned Lightwave (this is the very first work I did in Lightwave), storyboarded all three cinematics, lit it all, animated it all, rendered it all and then edited it all together. In short I did every single thing here, nobody else worked on these at all. It took twelve weeks.

Originally I was only meant to be doing one of the cinematics and that one cinematic was also meant to be ninety seconds long, not thirty (it turned out that at ninety seconds each the movies wouldn't fit onto a single CD with the game). After the first four weeks, one of the other artists was suddenly no longer with the company and so my schedule was just as suddenly to do two cinematics in the same time as had been allocated for the original one. Another month after that and the company was without a second artist and so I ended up doing three cinematics to the same schedule. The lighting and the surfacing could be better... but not in twelve weeks, and not when I was learning Lightwave at the same time. The storytelling, the composition... the Directing, if you will... I stand by all of that.

The final two pieces of work on this page are from the Playmates Interactive game "Skeleton Warriors". The first is the final cutscene in the game, it's only about ten seconds long but I think that's pretty impressive given that it took me about two days to do and it's also the very first piece of pre-rendered 3D animation I ever did. The second animation isn't a cinematic, it's one of the characters from the game. Both of these pieces were done in 3D Studio Release 3 (that's the original 3DS, not 3DS Max).

This is the first of the Star Wars cinematics that I tackled, and it's the finale of the Imperial campaign. It's also the very first work I did in Lightwave. I took the footage I'd already rendered for the ninety second version and re-edited it down in Premiere to thirty seconds. It's quite an interesting task, telling a story in half a minute, and not many people seem to be able to do it.

Click on the image to play or download the DIVX encoded movie.

This was for the mid point of the Rebel campaign. The shots of the Star Destroyer bridge are there to cover dialogue between the different staff aboard the Star Destroyer (not that the sound people at Lucasarts were interested in my notions of flow or sense... they left the bridge shots silent and put the dialogue in different, nonsensical places).

Click on the image to play or download the DIVX encoded movie.

The finale of the Rebel campaign. You may notice that story wise this is pretty much a retread of the Imperial cinematic. Well, that's Star Wars for you... something large always has to explode at the end.

Click on the image to play or download the DIVX encoded movie.

This is the first cinematic that I ever did. Somebody else was meant to be doing it but come the Friday afternoon before the Monday when the game had to be completed and out of the door and the person in charge of the cinematics came to me and said "Can you do cinematics?" The two figures here were already modeled so I hastily built the room, lit it all, animated it and rendered it all out between Friday afternoon and Sunday night. Some things could have been improved, but there was no time to do another render and so we had to make do with my first pass at it.

I had to capture this from the Playstation version of the game so it's a little messed up by all the compression and conversion it's been through.

Click on the image to play or download the DIVX encoded movie.

A small sample of in-game character animation. It's the only example I still have to hand but there were plenty more in Skeleton Warriors. This character is "Baron Dark", the chief bad guy in the Skeleton Warriors universe. Here he's simply cycling through all of his moves. It is, as you can see, fairly low frame count stuff. All of this, and the cinematic above are hand animated with keyframes, the old fashioned way. No motion capture.

Click on the image to play or download the DIVX encoded movie.