When Relic originally talked to me about The Outfit's cinematic (or NIS... non-interactive-sequence) content, it was how the quite-involved storyline could be woven into the game that really interested me as a director. The Outfit was not only going to be great fun to play; the single-player game also revolved around a quite complex storyline. This would be my first opportunity to work on a game and it didn't take much to convince me this was a project I could really get my head into. The story follows three heroes; Deuce, Mac and Tyler through their search for the German general responsible for massacring innocent women and children. On their way they encounter French resistance and a priest who survived one such massacre.

As we set about pulling together a talented team of people to create the NIS's, I was planning them out with storyboard artists, and we eventually began editing them together as animatics. Initially these were done using what we call a "table read." This is simply a group of people literally sitting around a table reading the script, normally just to see how it sounds out loud (things always come up in a table read that don't stand out on the page). We taped it and it made for pretty funny results -- particularly our design director Jeff Brown's attempts at Hitler. That performance will live on in the memories of anyone who heard it for many years to come. It also lives on my hard drive, so maybe I can get a sample of it up on this site... we'll see.

It's an important choice here at Relic that cinematic content should look and feel like the rest of the game. Many games feature highly finished rendered and lit cinematic sequences that often have the unfortunate effect of pulling a player out of the world of the game completely, something we wanted to avoid with The Outfit. Besides, as an Xbox 360 title, we're creating worlds that look just as good as the TV shows I was working on just a few years ago!


In typical Relic fashion, the response to the complexity of creating scenes that would run in game was to design and create our own Moviemaker tool, giving the animation team the ability to animate cameras, create cuts, and trigger in-game animations while in the game environment. This was understandably critical to our scene creation, and it was at times a rough ride as we were still developing the tool while completing the final scenes! It sounds crazy but hey, its production -- it's always got its challenges. If it didn't we'd all be bored!

At the same time that scenes were being set up, we were also busy casting all of our actors, both for voice work and our Motion Capture session. Voice came first, replacing our lovely table read with the contributions of talented actors like Robert Patrick, Ron Perlman, and TC Carson. Once in the can, these recording sessions formed the basis for our second Mocap shoot.