Under Cover

Lee's Room :: Most of the time, game cinematics deal with fantasy or sci-fi themes. With Under Cover, the setting was near-future Tokyo, but the story begged for an almost film noir approach. This fit in well with the overall visual and gameplay theme, opposites: Light and dark, loud and quiet. Kei and Sammi :: Even though I farmed the character modeling work out to some of the best in the business--Zygote--there were a lot of issues with the models satisfying our Japanese client's sensibilities, even after a few passes. Ultimately, I decided to do the revisions to the faces myself until we got signoff. Aftermath :: The final shot of the closing cinematic. Throughout the project, I tried to set up and animate as many scenes as possible, and towards the end I did a lot of the camera and lighting tweaks myself, this shot included. I also did most of the compositing and all of the editing for the entire project.

PROJECT: Directed high-res 3D Cinematics for Under Cover, a Japanese Dreamcast Game. Work performed for Pulse Interactive in Japan (Pulse KK).

SOFTWARE: 3D Studio MAX, Photoshop, Premiere

SCOPE: Directed five and a quarter minutes of high-resolution 3D character animation for Japanese client. My work included meeting with the client in the US and Japan, revising the storyboards, creating story reels (2D animatics), art and animation direction, modeling revisions to the main characters, compositing and editing, and hands-on tweaking of many of the scenes.

NOTES: I have a keen interest in Japanese animation and its unique film grammar, so this was a great opportunity to put some of that knowledge to use.

Images (L-R) by various artists at Mondo Media & Zygote ©1999 Pulse Interactive