The World Champion of Fail. - by JB

You guys are in luck - I found some movie files from the very first game I worked on...WCW Backstage Assault for the Playstation, and N64. This was done at Kodiak Interactive in Salt Lake City from 1999-2000, and I think we were just finishing it up when Nigel came to work with us. It was also me who hounded Nigel to come work at Kodiak, and Thor and I begged the company to hire him. Check out the post under this one to see what he got to work on after he FINALLY got into the USA (that's an adventure he needs to tell...it's a good one). The company closed like a year after he joined, so take that, Nigel! Leave a steady gig in Montreal to come be unemployed in the USA! So here we are, ten years later and he's still in Salt Lake City. Sure, he had a short stint in California thia summer, but he REALLY REALLY loves Utah for some reason.

Okay, back to my crappy animation. So when I joined Kodiak I was fresh out of college with my diploma in Classical (2D) Animation. Obviously I wasn't good enough to get a job at a place like Disney or Dreamworks, so when I was asked to interview with a games studio I was like 'Okay, I guess I like to play games...they must be fun to make, right?' Plus I would get to learn 3D on the job, so what the hell. So I got the job at Kodiak (after I BOMBED an interview with EA in the UK, but I didn't want to work there, anyway. That interview day is a good story, so remind me to tell it in another post) and my first day they basically go 'well here's your computer - have fun.' Huh? I guess I have to learn Maya as I go, then. I tried to find the very first animation I did there, but I must have destroyed it...for good reason, too, it was two wrestlers that were supposed to do something like clothesline each other, but it ended up looking like two peg-legged pirates having seizures underwater. It was so stiff and floaty, but I bet it would look hilarious now.

Eventually I learned enough to actually do my job and spent the next 8 months cleaning up mocap, with the occasional hand-keyed animation for moves that they either forgot to capture or something extra that the designers needed. I have an example of my best hand-keyed animation later on in this post. Here's a short montage of some of the stuff I got to clean up that year - the guy who looks like he's in convulsions is actually supposed to be getting electrocuted. Make sure to take note of how I show Bill Goldberg's signature entrance from the worst camera angle ever. That's how I roll. See, this wrestling game was EXTREME! Wrestling ring? Fuck that! Wrestling fans don't want no weak-ass wrestling ring - they want to wrestle in the fucking parking lot! Yeah that's right, I worked on a wrestling game that had no ring. As I recall, the publisher made this decision with like 4 months to go in the schedule. Awesome.

Here's where I body slam the principles of animation, suplex timing, leg drop weight, and camel clutch arcs and overlapping action!!

WCW BSA from John B on Vimeo.

This one still makes me laugh. The little dance he does in the middle of the attack is awesome.

lolpunch from John B on Vimeo.

Here it is, one of my aweome hand-keyed wrestling animations. Fuck, it's incredible. I might put it on my reel even now.

amazing from John B on Vimeo.

So that was my first game - after that one shipped, I got put on a baseball game...you guessed it, more mocap. After about a year on that, the publisher yanked it from Kodiak and decided that they wanted to finish it in-house. I guess that was the straw that broke the camel's back, because the studio closed a month or two later. I'm actually pretty thankful, in retrospect. If you work with mocap for too long, it's easy to get into a comfortable groove and after a while you kind of forget what it's like to have to plan out an animation, then act it out, keyframe it, muck with the timing, fix the floatiness, and then make it 'yours' from start to finish. You know, the whole reason I got into animation in the first place.

BONUS!!

I found the reel I had to make after Kodiak closed. Nigel and I stayed late in the studio rendering our shit out and then learning how to use Adobe Premiere, while at the same time cursing it for crashing every 5 seconds. The reel is like way too long, and it's a fucking disgrace. The audio track is way loud for some reason, and it's some awful Powerman 5000 song so you may want to mute your speakers for it. It's all cleaned up mocap with some of my college work tacked on to the end.

JB Reel 2001 from John B on Vimeo.

I ended up going to Treyarch a month or so after Kodiak closed and got to work on the Minority Report game - yet another project that got completely scrapped and redesigned with six months to go in the production cycle. I got to learn how to animate in 3Ds Max for that one - the old school Max with Character Studio and no graph editor. It was a battle, and I ended up quitting after less than a year and going to Bungie to work on the Halo series. Here's a reel I found from the Treyarch days...I'm guessing this is mid-2002 or so?

JB Reel 2002 from John B on Vimeo.

I hate watching my stuff. I think it's all shit and every video I see from Gobelins makes me want to quit animation and go home and overdose.

Happy animating, everyone!

JB