Colin Graham is a Director of Animation on Watch_Dogs from Ubisoft Montreal. He Graduated from Sheridan College Classical animation in Oakville Canada in 1999. He began his career at Electronic Arts UK working on the Harry Potter series before coming to Ubisoft Montreal in 2005. Since joining Ubisoft he has directed animation teams on the Splinter Cell and Naruto franchises. In 2009 a small team started out on a mandate to create a new franchise with the code name ‘Nexus’. It would eventually become Watch_Dogs, a become the biggest selling new IP of all time.
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Talk - Animating Watch_Dogs
It’s been a year since the launch of the new console generation, and expectations and budgets have never been higher. Developing a new IP like Watch_Dogs and launching on two console generations at the same time put us in a position to try a new approach on animation. On Watch_Dogs we wanted knew we needed to increase the number of animations and also the quality from previous games and previous hardware generations.
This session will look at how the Watch_Dogs team in Montreal created a strategy to use and unprecedented amount of motion capture, and how also we raised the level of quality of individual animations. We will look at techniques used to bring Aiden Pearce to life, and how we realized the living city of Chicago through motion capture.
Now we are fully in the new generation of consoles, how will we keep up with expectation and how will we evolve?