What I do at High Moon Studios (Read, the pictures are missleading)

Some people, especially family, have been asking me to explain what I do for High Moon Studios. My title is Assistant Cinematic Animator. I work on the movies that are either in between game-play or whenever the camera takes over and you are not playing for those seconds. To make those 'movies' I am given storyboards(drawn frames of the vision of the sequence) (note these are NOT storyboards from High Moon studios, these are random boards I found on Google from www.carllyonsstudio.com. I just want to show an example of storyboards in case you don't know what they are),Mocap Data (recorded off of actors that are hired to come in) (This is not a photo or actor that has worked at High Moon Studios, once again just a random picture I pulled off of Google to show you an example). They wear the black spandex suits with the white balls that allow the Mocap cameras to catch the movement. I then take those boards and the data from the Mocap shoot and apply the motion to 3D Models (pretty much a puppet on the computer). I match the cameras to match the angles and cuts of the storyboards. After several cycles of the Directors coming by and suggesting changes, I finally hear "DONE. Ship it!" (hopefully!). And then I move on to the next sequence.

We have a team of about three Cinematic Animators. So many times we will pass around sequences to help each other out. So it is hard to have ownership over certain sequences. There is one example of our work that is on gamespy.com. The first 10 seconds is a cinematic I worked on, after that is recorded game play.