Coray Seifert, Game Designer at Kaos Studios gave a revealing presentation on just how much work is involved in creating Cinematics for the Frontlines: Fuel of War game during the GameX industry Summit held October 24-25, 2009. Basically, Cinematics are in-game movies utilized by the game company’s narrative design team to impart important story information to the player. Cinematics have become such an effective narrative tool over the years that now Gaming studios are hiring filmmakers to direct these scenes for maximum dramatic effect.

For Frontlines, Coray explained that one of the key lessons learned during the game’s production was that while it may have been tempting to create in-game movies with 3D animation software as soon as possible, it is far less time consuming and more cost effective to start from storyboards first- the simple logic being that it is far easier to change a drawing than to re-render a animation that may have taken days to render.

1)    Connect Cinematics with your gameplay.

2)    Pwn your pipeline, let not your pipeline pwn you.

3)    Iterate when things are on paper.

4)    If it’s not working in the animatics phase, it’s not going to work in the game.

5)    People don’t notice the [stuff] you think they’re going to notice but they notice the [stuff] that you don’t.

6)    Utilize one cinematic lighting effects specialist.

7)    Get ten times as much hardware that you’ll think you’ll need.