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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Igniting the Shared Experience with Cinematics in Assassin's Creed Unity
Speaker(s): David Footman
Company Name(s): Ubisoft
Track / Format: Production

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Overview: Challenged with creating a compelling narrative for ACU 4-player COOP missions, the Toronto Cinematic team, who had just finished Splinter Cell Blacklist scripted events, had to try something completely different. The intros needed to occupy a different space than the AC single player experience, yet feel connected to the brand and SP campaign! Characters and story, Robert McKee said, are actually the same thing so stop arguing about which is more important. COOP could be played in any order so a linear story with story arcs was out of the question. Our stories, had to be totally mission contained, and themes would instead be carried across the whole campaign. So we chose to build our mission intros like trailers for missions, and boiled them down to their absolute essence. Every step of our process was about distilling the dialogue, narration and character actions down to sharp, dynamic and short mission intros that contained the highest level of SEE-SAY possible. Our vision statement became "ignite gameplay" and this informed every aspect of our production. This presentation takes the audience step by step through our blueprint, elevator pitches, style guide, cinematic vision documents, treatments, first pass intro, storyboards, pre-visualization with scratch audio, and then to the animation and script team moving to in-engine pre-visualization.

GDC 2015

David Footman

Ubisoft

free content

Production

Production

Visual Arts

Visual Arts