Last year worked on various projects for video game cinematic specialists The Trailerfarm. They’re a lovely bunch to work for and they get a lot of really fun projects for animators to get their teeth into. At a games studio the cinematics and trailers are often the first things to be outsourced if the developer doesn’t have the time or capacity to do all the animation in-house. It’s a block of work that usually requires little or no input from the coders so is easy to get done elsewhere. Also a games developer may not have artists specifically focused on camerawork, lighting and so on to do the job. Animators at the games studio will look on enviously as these fun sequences get done at another studio while back at the developer everyone is authoring hundreds of turn-on-the-spot animations or creating variants of every character’s animations to use when they’re holding a variety of weapons. The Trailer Farm is a studio specifically set up for all those fun outsourced sequences and they have a whole team of in-house cinematics experts working mainly in Unity and Unreal to bring a bit of drama to proceedings.
Of all of the things I worked on with them I think I enjoyed working on the Monstrum 2 trailer the most. It was a quick turnaround (All the animation was done from scratch in 15 days) but I think it turned out pretty well. It’s also a huge contrast to most of the other things I’ve done over the last few years – there’s not much horror in children’s TV. I also worked with TTF on cinematics for Borderlands 3 and the launch trailer for The Cycle Season 3.
Matthew Stephenson 