My first job was with the small games company Particle Systems. They were making a sci-fi space game called Dreadnaught and needed some CG movies for it. Little did I know that the entire 30 odd minutes of intros, outros and cutscenes were to be produced soley by a team that consisted of myself, fresh out of college, another Animator and a Modeller who was also required to build all the in-game assets. so, pretty much 3 artists. About 18 months later we’d finished and the result was called I-War (independence War in the US) and I was very proud of our achievement.
All the work done for I-War was produced in Lightwave and back in the day (the game was released in 1997) we didnt even have the benefit of Open GL so everything was done in wireframe. Character animation was very basic, proper character tools hadn’t filtered down to us at that point so little shortcuts and cheats were used all the time. There were so many shots to do that both me and Michael Todd who was the other animator took ownership of sequences and entire acts, it worked really well that way. We did everything from design to final render, it was the best education in CG moviemaking you could get. I loved it, and the game turned out to be a cult classic.
Okay some of the stuff doesnt really hold up these days, but it’s still pretty good for 1997.
Heres part 2 of the movie:
Job Breakdown: Modelling, animation, lighting, rendering, editing, sound design, graphic design (box art for both europe and US).
