Laying It All Out

I was one of the first guys on the team for the X-COM pitch cinematic.  While our 2-D animatic and hero characters were being made I was busy laying out our set, and building low poly proxy models for all the objects and spaces our characters were going to exist in and interact with.  I then placed cameras that closely matched the storyboards and 2-D animatic.  This allowed us to figure out the scale of our world, test out our 2D ideas in a 3D space, and create an environment for early animation tests.  The modelers were then able to very efficiently remodel everything in high poly using my models as a template.

Creating this low poly set did not take much time, and paid dividends further in the pipeline since a lot of problems had been figured out before any really expensive work was done.  Everyone could focus on making a visually stunning cinematic.

Take a look at this layout page showing my early low poly set, and stills of the finished set from the final movie.

Pitching A Winning Strategy Game

Every success story has a beginning.  XCOM: Enemy Unknown's involved a small team of incredibly passionate artists that wanted to make a statement about where strategy gaming could go.  So we made a movie.  Half of the shots in this were animated by me, and I will have another post showing some of the process that went into their creation. 

Watch it here:


X-COM Pitch Movie Credits

Lead Artist – Greg Foertsch

Lead Animator – Dennis Moellers

Animators –  Justin Thomas
                   Kevin Bradley

Modelers –  Chris Sulzbach (Hero Soldier/high poly set)
                 Brian Mahoney (Furniture/Room Deco)

                 Ryan Murray (Sectoid/Sectopod)

                 Bryce Homick (items in bedroom)

                 Nathan Gordon (truck/shotgun)

                 Justin Thomas (low poly set model/layout)

FX Animators –  Brian Feldges

                       Mike Bazzell

Concept Artist – Piero MacGowan

Sound –  Roland Rizzo

            Mark Cromer

UI Artist – Steve Ogden

These are the people responsible for creating the original pitch movie for the game “X-COM: Enemy Unknown.”  This pre-rendered cinematic was created over a four month time frame from January to April in 2008. A handful of us had started preliminary work in December of 2007.  It represents our vision for the “X-COM” remake we wanted to develop.  Originally we wanted the title to be simply “X-COM” but that idea changed over the course of development for many reasons. 

Little did we know that we were embarking on a nearly five year development journey that would push us harder, and bring us closer as a team than any other title previously developed at Firaxis Games.

I feel privileged to have had such a large involvement with its creation.