Experience

I moved from Paris back to Los Angeles to join the newly underway XDefiant team. Back to FPS where the majority of my career has taken place. Though in title I was again Animation Director given my deep FPS  design knowledge and XP of COD and ZOMBIES, I was imbedded with the core team and design leadership to help craft the feel of the game raise the quality and oversee much of the 3C development. I did deep dives on our systems and mechanics and made many recommendation and directed various initiatives for improvement. If that was not a big enough task, I also supported Marketing and various MTX content through review and feedback at key stages of development. 

I joined the Ubisoft team in Paris as animation director on the Breakpoint production. After consulting on many open world games previously, I knew how much work there would be on the player locomotion alone, yet the game also demanded vehicles of all types,  many many NPC behavior to manage and numerous cinematics , quest givers. And facial animation... so much dialogue!

This title released in '23 but I actually worked with the team at Deep Silver in 2017-18 as a "Creative Producer" overseeing projects (Including Dead Island 2) that required 360 support, as well as review  and approval of stage gates. I was injected into a team to to a top to bottom assessment of the studio practices and staffing as well as reviewing games design and expectation. After many interviews and playtest reviews I would submit a report of recommendations and in cases would be responsible for directing the execution of proposed solutions. 

Having directed over 17 on disc and DLC Zombies experiences, I moved over to the campaign side of Call of Duty,  directing 3 campaign levels; Mission 1 "Black OPs", Hypo-Center , Gardens by the Bay. 

While I was still intimately involved with the animation team, as a studio leader and mentor, much more of my day to day was focused on planning the success of ZOMBIES. As the now Creative Director, I remained very close to the ZOMBIES game play design and vision side of development. I was also spending a significant amount of energy on long term strategies of the IP. Which was becoming a serious 3rd offering for Call of Duty franchise and growing into a must have for all subsequent COD titles across multiple studios.  

I held a combo title Lead Animator and Design Director, during the start of this production. By the end was a full fledged Owner for ZOMBIES. 

I held a combo title Lead Animator and Design Director, during the start of this production. By the end of production going into the DLC season, I moved over entirely as the creative owner for ZOMBIES. This included 2 On disc experiences "5" and Ascension. 

I began this production as a Sr. Animator, early on I was promoted to lead Animator. I took on sole oversite of the gameplay side of this production. From Weapons and NPC behaviors, I would plan and task out a team of animators followed with review and instruction soon became a significant portion of my day to day. The team was given a special charge during prodcution "create a fantastic secret game mode". I was very fortunate to be a part of the small team who created Nazi Zombies. An unlock after completing the campaign, which soon grew into the cult fan favorite taking on a life of it's own. 

I took a short mission on another Treyarch team, working on cinematics for Spiderman 3 the movie associated video game. It was great to take on more stylized characters. I key framed numerous Spidey web swing flip entrances from gameplay into cut scenes, as  well as a tense cinematic  starring Peter Parker (Toby Maguire), Harry (James Franco) and J. Jonah (J.K. Simmons) including facial / dialogue. I also animated the Sandman during a key and epic cinematic moment that pushed our FX budget to the limit, as well as choreographing and  polishing an ensemble scene of the Arsenic Candy gang which was selected to be used in the official Xbox launch trailer. This work as a mix of hand key and mocap clean up. Blending between key frame and motion capture was a new challenge for me, as the action was more "fantastic" than was my previous experience with the more realistic Call of Duty style. 

As a mid level and soon into production promoted to Sr. animator, I over saw planning and execution of many gameplay and cinematic animations. I was also charged with sorting out the vehicle design / Animation pipeline.  After identifying  many issues involving poor communication methods and lacking clear production pipelines, responsible for much wasted time and work. I set to work over many months of collaborations and research to developed a robust pipeline for design requests and throughput which facilitated increased scopes and efficiencies. 

As a mid level animator I was responsible for crafting gameplay and cinematic performances, including the hybrid and super complex interactive river crossing sequence. This took many months of planning,  back and forth with technical teams, and production work. But eventually was realized on e of the most epic moment of the game.

The 1st Console game in the franchise. I started as a technical animator, responsible for building, integrating and refining animations. From gameplay to cinematic, my claim to fame was identifying a serious bug where by cell formatting (from copy pasted text) in Excel (yes we were using Excel at runtime) was breaking the game.