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Description
Here's a fun bit of DS2 production trivia; Mostly what I did at Vigil was work on cameras and engaging in or managing cinematic production for Darksiders II, but there was room for other stuff. I also helped to design some of what we called "Death Interactives", little one-shot animations for kill sequences on various enemies. This particular sequence is a favorite of mine, and one which you see a lot in the middle of the game.

We had thought it might help the outsource animators if we gave them storyboards or even small, rough animations to assist in describing the actions. Because the outsource studio was located in China, there was a language barrier that made describing animations more than a little bit challenging... it's amazing the ways you can be misunderstood when translating visual concepts to written descriptions in English and then translating that into Mandarin to be reinterpreted visually.

To that end, I did a few of these little gif sequences that we included with our anim descriptions and other resources. They were just meant to act as a sort of animatic, a visual notation to help describe what we needed to be produced by people thousands of miles away.

Interestingly, we found that these little rough animatics did not help the outsource animators... it was hard to tell why, exactly, but it seemed like they got hung up on trying to match what was animated in the rough rather than seeing it as a visual notation. We'd get back keys that looked right only if viewed at a certain angle, or which locked to the timing of the gif rather than being timed as best for the action.

So we stopped doing these after a short while (they weren't very time-efficient anyway), and sadly I was only able to rescue a few of them before the Great THQ Collapse caused all that work to be lost, probably forever... servers and systems were recycled, data was probably erased if someone in management didn't specifically create a backup, and given that I was out three months before ship and eight months before it all went truly kablooey, I don't think anyone bothered to care.

So it goes. It was fun while it lasted.

Description
Here's a fun bit of DS2 production trivia; Mostly what I did at Vigil was work on cameras and engaging in or managing cinematic production for Darksiders II, but there was room for other stuff. I also helped to design some of what we called "Death Interactives", little one-shot animations for kill sequences on various enemies. This particular sequence is a favorite of mine, and one which you see a lot in the middle of the game.

We had thought it might help the outsource animators if we gave them storyboards or even small, rough animations to assist in describing the actions. Because the outsource studio was located in China, there was a language barrier that made describing animations more than a little bit challenging... it's amazing the ways you can be misunderstood when translating visual concepts to written descriptions in English and then translating that into Mandarin to be reinterpreted visually.

To that end, I did a few of these little gif sequences that we included with our anim descriptions and other resources. They were just meant to act as a sort of animatic, a visual notation to help describe what we needed to be produced by people thousands of miles away.

Interestingly, we found that these little rough animatics did not help the outsource animators... it was hard to tell why, exactly, but it seemed like they got hung up on trying to match what was animated in the rough rather than seeing it as a visual notation. We'd get back keys that looked right only if viewed at a certain angle, or which locked to the timing of the gif rather than being timed as best for the action.

So we stopped doing these after a short while (they weren't very time-efficient anyway), and sadly I was only able to rescue a few of them before the Great THQ Collapse caused all that work to be lost, probably forever... servers and systems were recycled, data was probably erased if someone in management didn't specifically create a backup, and given that I was out three months before ship and eight months before it all went truly kablooey, I don't think anyone bothered to care.

So it goes. It was fun while it lasted.