The Dead Space 2 team wanted to try and inject more of an epic/action feel into the franchise in order to compete with the likes of Gears of War. To achieve this a portion of the animation team was segmented off to focus in on epic moments in the game. As a response to our intense crunching on DS1 the DS2 production sought to provide us with more time to develop our sequences with the idea of creating less content but at a higher quality. Not very often do you get that opportunity in the professional world!

This is an animation breakdown of the previous shot illustrating the development process I use for delivering an animation.

Another "epic" moment in Dead Space 2. Neal Thibodeaux, Primo Navidad and myself had about 2 months to pull off a 3 part sequence for our E3 demo. My part here, was the conclusion and segue into Chapter 6 of the game.

The introduction to the final boss of Dead Space. I had 3 weeks to pull off what was originally prevised as a 10 second long intro. As I started animated we discovered that there would be no way to hit all of the story points needed in 10 seconds and so this intro blossomed into a massive 49 seconds.

*SPOILER WARNING!!!*
This is the ending to Dead Space. So if you are playing or interested in playing then watching this may spoil a few things for you... This cinematic panned out in a similar fashion to the final boss intro above. I had about 3 weeks to create what was thought would only be about a 10 second clip. While these cinematics were super intense to create they're loose planning allowed me to be super creative with how I developed them.

Waiting for one of DS2's epic moments to be planned out, I got tasked with creating a new set of hit reactions for Isaac. Kind of a fun, fast, and fiery exercise. I had 9 days to create 9 hit reactions. Shhh! 2 of these are cleaned up Mocap, however!

Most of my work on DS1 was spent creating in-game cinematics. This was one of the few opportunities I had on the project to contribute to actual game play animation; a walk cycle for one of DS's boss characters.

More game play animation from DS1. This was an animation that played when you got close enough to one of these nasties to wake him(her?) up.

Once the above "awake" animation would finish this ugly sucker would go into an agitated idle animation until you were dumb enough to come yet closer, at which point he/she'd knock your head off.