Meeting the lead cinematics designer at Bioware

Hey again folks,

I got a bit of free time before I have to hand in a major final presentation. My classmates and I all had to make an analog board game which is balanced, unique and built to professional standards for a prototype. The teacher then plays all our board game with his wife and kids and marks on it in regards to presentation, playability, fun factor, uniqueness etc etc.

Anyways, that's done and will be handed in and presented soon, so as I said, I have a bit of free time. I'll go into a bit of detail of how privileged we are at Vancouver Film School, we were treated to a presentation by none other than Armando Troisi, the lead cinematic designer for Bioware. This guy helped shape and mold the likes of Mass Effect and Dragon age. Any in game cut scenes, or even interactive cut scenes (meaning conversations) was overlooked by him. To top it all off, he is a grad from Vancouver Film School. Anyways he went into great detail on how cinematics in game design works, you must have an eye for detail of course, but you must also be a student of film in regards to how lighting, posing, framing, etc works. Every little detail is in your control and must be addressed to make the best possible cinematic. Armando also went into detail to how cinematics works, they'll do anything and everything to make the cinematic work the way they want, more often then not this means "hacking" the game engine. This means ripping cameras, adding filters, posing chars in ways they were never meant to be etc etc. He also mentioned how in nearly every scene in a game cinematic the parts of the character that are not seen in the frame are probably doing the most bizarre things you can imagine. They are only concerned with making the characters or scene do exactly what they want, they do not care how it is done or what other parts outside of the view of the "camera" are doing. As long as it works right?

Anyways, the presentation was fantastic and enlightening. There is now a real desire for cinematic designers in games and is certainly a route people can go once they finish a video game design degree, for those that love movies and games such as myself this could be a dream job within a dream job.