Kameo: Elements of Power - Animating Cinematics

2002 to 2005 - Microsoft XBox 360 action/adventure game

Working for Rare in England - Position: Lead Animator

Over the three years I worked on Kameo I did a huge number of cutscenes along with my other responsibilities. Many of them changed dramatically as the game developed to fit the changing story and gameplay. The best of the cinematics (that I was predominantly responsible for) are below. There were others I worked on but I've stuck to the ones that are more my work than others for this page. There is also a selection of my animatics at the bottom of the page for sequences that might not have made it into production (or were largely worked on by other animators). For examples of lighting and rendering have a look at the Stills Gallery. I did a lot of editing for trailers over the years too so check out those at the Trailers page. You can read an interview with me about Kameo here and here on the official Kameo website. There are also interviews with a number of the other Kameo team members.

Cloud Flying Intro

Funnily enough this sequence was originally conceived for the purposes of a trailer. Nick and I (our concept artist and a past animator) both felt strongly that it was time we did an advert that eluded to the story of the game rather than just quick cuts of the gameplay. So after a meeting about what we wanted, I designed this idea of seeing mini pivotal scenes from throughout the story glimced briefly in the clouds before the camera sweeps down to the castle below to start showing off the characters in action. It was enormously effective and you can see that trailer here. Obviously it was also my intension to use this in the game and it was logical that it would go at the start, which it did at first. Strangely it was pulled away from the start at one point and used in a crystal ball scene for a while until everyone came to their senses and realised it would work much better as our intro. At which point it had to go through a major update to make it as impressive as it could be. We added the Kameo jumping off the bridge idea to put the player straight in the action, and since Chilla didn't have an evolve scene of his own it made sense that this would be the first character you'd see her change into. It became one of the more spectacular transformations and I loved the idea that her the entire action would lead you seamlessly into the gameplay. So the very next thing that happens is Chilla sliding down the icy wall of the castle under the player's control.

Thorn Beats Kameo

There were plenty of animatics created that dug into the story elements of the game with characters that actually needed to have performances, but this was probably the first one that I made with full animation. Previous to this all the FMV work had been cheated comic book style (semi-animated) scenes or the evolve scenes that were more spectacle than performance. You can see a few of the storyboard panels for this scene at Kameo.com and below here is an early animatic that outlines a longer sequence that was unfortunately cut back in order to have it ready for a games show.

Evolve Pummel Weed

All the Evolve scenes were very complex pieces that required a lot of R&D, but they presented fantastic opportunities to do something imaginative. The only rules were that it had to start with the baby monster and it had to transform into the adult monster, ideally through a method that reflected their elemental theme. I've included an earlier version of this Evolve cinematic developed for the original Xbox. I later decided to upgrade all the FMVs to HD resolution at the same time as changing the characters to match their new Xbox 360 designs.

You can see a few of the storyboard panels for the end of this scene at Kameo.com. Below here is the original animatic for the scene.

Evolve Cloud Monster

This was one of the more imaginative characters in the game. Unfortunately after this cut-scene was finished the character proved too hard technically to implement in the game and we were beginning to realise we didn't need so many characters so he got the chop. But this scene was made available to view as an unlockable extra (along with the animatic below) and featured in some of the early trailers for the game.

Evolve Rubble

This was a scene that was initially worked on my my friend Neil, but when we decided to revamp all the cut-scenes for the Xbox 360 Neil had moved onto another team. So I polished up the first half without changing too much and started the second half again from scratch. The original version was done at a time when we were taking a lot of shortcuts as part of the style of the scenes, but we'd taken all the other scenes a lot further and it was time to do something equally impressive for this.

Evolve 40 Below

I originally created the Snowman Evolve scene with a more snowball like theme but as the character designs all changed this scene had to be updated as well. All the characters were generally made to look more detailed and aggressive, mostly through the addition of bumpy surfaces and spikes. In this particular case I actually preferred the original 'Snowman' design and I think he lost his snowball qualities in the update. So you can see both the final and the original versions here, along with the animatic I originally storyboarded below.

Evolve Flex

Like all the evolve scenes Flex was a unique problem. He had to look like water and be completely malleable. So this required looking into water and water shaders, and some hand painted frames to blend between elements. There was another water themed scene, but I've not included it here because I only did a polish job on the effects and final look of it and the animation was done by Neil. Both scenes turned out pretty well though and I was lucky that they didn't change too much when the rest of the characters were being updated (spikes wouldn't have looked good on water!). Here's the animatic for the Flex scene.

End of Game

The magnum-opus of the entire game. This huge sequence had to top everything you'd seen, push the capabilities of Kameo beyond what you'd previously experienced, draw together numerous story threads, introduce a twist in the plot and give the player a satisfactory ending. It was developed towards the end of the game's development so was under pressure to be completed fast and there were other less important scenes that suffered in order to make it all that it could be, but it was worth it. My biggest regret though was that the musical score didn't live up to the same standards and robs the visuals of their intended impact during some scenes. Unfortunately everyone was under pressure and the inter-team communication was suffering at this point. In many ways I wish we'd have used the temp track as it matched the grandeur much better and would have given the musician more time to work on other parts of the game. You can see the sequence in mid-development below with a mixture of pre-visualisation, unfinished animation and storyboards.

Attract Mode Group Shot

This group shot plays under the Title/Start screen and shows off all the characters the player can play. It went through many iterations over the years, touched by many animators and artists. Ultimately the changing character designs dictated that it was destined to be continually updated. But as we developed the look of the cinematics and pushed our technical skills it became clear to me that we should really push the boat out to make this impressive in line with the best of the rest of the cinematics. It was going to be far to visible for anything less. So this became a grand attempt to do something visually impressive using many of the techniques I'd developed in the other cut-scenes. It was also one of the very last things to be worked on right up to the last deadline for the end of the game so it still contains a few flaws, but nothing too obvious.

Warp Kalus

One of the deleted scenes. This was part of an idea that you (the player) might be intercepted as you transported across the kingdom, to engage in battle with one of the game's principle baddies, Kalus. It would have added another layer of gameplay while giving the character more to do, as it was Kalus only really appeared in cinematics and the player never gets to interact with her much until the final showdown. Eventually time restrictions meant that this idea was dropped after the cut-scene was already done.

Theena Gives Kameo the Ortho Book

This deleted sequence started life like most of the others as an animatic. But at this stage storyboards and animatics were fairly new to the team and they liked them so much they thought we didn't really need to do any animation. This wasn't initially a popular decision with the animators but at least it gave me some time to experiment with visual techniques that could be applied to 'excuse' the story book style of visuals. But once the first evolve scenes started to be done in full animation it was clear that it all should be. Some people thought it would save us time and money to make all the cut-scenes in this glorified storyboard form, but in reality you still had to pose, light and render the scenes so it wasn't saving much time. Adding the animation just brought an appropriate amount of polish without taking significantly longer. Never the less this sequence sat in the game for a while during development and it was earmarked for an update along with the rest of them. But what most people didn't realise was that an update for this scene would have been like starting from scratch and wouldn't have been an update at all. It wasn't a very interesting scene anyway and I convinced the director to drop it in favour of spending more time on other scenes.

Cloth and Hair

Not actually a scene itself, this video just shows you some of the cloth and hair solutions we developed to make some of the characters more convincing. All of the characters used joints to control their hair and clothes, but in order to make them flow naturally I looked into using Maya cloth with buttons mounted on it that drove the joints. This worked very well in most places. The result was baked to the joints and any glitches were fixed by hand. Amazingly the programmers managed to create something similar in game... in real time.

Animatics

Along with the many animatics above there were loads of sequences that I storyboarded that didn't get made, but they were included as a special feature that players can unlock in the game. This is a small selection of them.

	Cailem Leads Trolls	An early scene designed to build on the, Cailem, character
	History Introduction	Another version of how the game would start
	Evolve Thermite	This one was animated largely by my friend Neil
	Evolve Tree Monster	This character was never implemented in the game
	Evolve Whirly Bird	This character was never implemented in the game