Cinematic Design, all about Storytelling

In 2022 I had the opportunity to work as a Cinematic Designer as part of the cinematic team at Firesprite Playstation, changing also my title inside of the company from Environment Artist to help and develop Cinematics for the games. That was where I switched from the Art department to Design. I wanted to learn more about cinematics in games since I used to work as a Filmmaker in the past in a few films, shorts and marketing content back in London.
With this opportunity I put together my film and videogames experience, a great chance to keep improving as game developer.

In case you don't know what a Cinematic Designer does, basically they are in charge of the structure of the cinematics of the game, the in-game sequences, not necessarily the final polish camera but focusing more on the main design or sketch, creating and adding everything -and everyone- in position, setup the sequences with blockouts to previsualize the scenes following director guidelines (if they exist), so the animators and the camera artists has a base to work on.
Depending on the studio or project size, cinematic designer and artist can actually be the same position. If you are just starting in the role using your own ideas could be difficult, usually everything comes from narrative, design and cinematic directors.

Cinematic Design starts in pre-production, so we usually have just some 3D placeholders to use

My film experience was a great portfolio to demonstrate those skills but I also decided to do a project for myself in Unreal to show up my skills with the engine in terms of design, since previously all my work where focus on environments. That project was Saga (check out the other Cinematic post) I also have this page with some previous work as a filmmaker

So with that, I started a journey in Cinematic Design, which still under NDA. Frustrating, yes, That's exactly why I decided to do a Cinematic Design Showreel to show some of those skills. it wasn’t that good, but I wanted to show some of the skills, at least on the art side since a big part of the role it's not visible. Tasks like technical sequencer administration, organization between teams, breakdowns, tools, workflows, documentation and its integration with other departments, this is something you can talk about during interviews but not show it on you reel. Creating this showreel has been helpful, although I can't replicate a breakdown of an AAA studio on my own. I used some environments from the marketplace and I created other ones, I even did some animations as well, I wouldn’t use this as a selling point but I would like it to share because I believe it’s important sometimes to show not only the best and more polished work, but the journey.

I did it in a couple of weeks after work. It was born from the need to get something done that I can actually show since working for AAA makes you unable to have any portfolio at all for a very long time. AAA projects are long and tedious, so it's very difficult to show your current skills or work until the companies release the content years after, or months if you're lucky. Sometimes even with that, you are not even allow to show it.

Even if I can't talk about what I'm doing, I wanted to write a bit about my experience as a Cinematic Designer. It’s a interesting position and it varies from one studio to another. In smaller studios, probably the animators are in charge of anything related to cinematics and they can do everything. On medium sizes studios you can see how the position splits between Animators and Camera/Cinematic Artists already, which are also in charge of what I'm doing at Playstation. In big studios you also can see how Camera/Cinematic Artist splits again so we have Camera Designers or even Technical Cinematic Designers.

If you want to learn about the role I put here some resources that you can find useful:

The Cinematics of 'Horizon Forbidden West

Game Cinematics: Production, Pipelines and Workflows

The Cinematic Process Behind 'God of War'

The Art Of Cinematic Videogames

Cinematic and Sequencer in Unreal

Thanks for reading!

Fran