Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood was my very first project in the games industry. Fresh out of school in 2009, I was looking for an internship when a golden door opened: the door of Ubisoft Annecy. Once the internship was over, I was hired as a 3D Animator on the game’s multiplayer.

Released in November 2010, Brotherhood was the first Assassin’s Creed to offer a multiplayer mode, developed in Annecy: players hunt each other through the cities of Renaissance Italy, each with their own character, blending into the crowd before they strike.

A fighting style for every character

As an animator at Ubisoft Annecy, you had to be versatile. The studio had around seventy people at the time, so everyone wore several hats, and the job went well beyond 3D animation alone.

The animation team covered the characters’ locomotion and the famous kills, when two players go at each other. On this nine month production, my challenge was to work with the whole team to find a fighting style for each character, and to adapt their locomotion to each personality, so that every fight would look as spectacular as possible.

It all started with brainstorming sessions that could last for hours, where we filmed ourselves acting out every move. Then came the mocap shoots, some of them with stunt performers, and the motion editing, mixed with keyframe animation, because not every stunt could be done in mocap.

Gameplay animations are short, technical and triggered by the game code, so the menu animations I also worked on were where we had the most room to express our creativity.

Finding my place

This was my first professional experience, at a company as big as Ubisoft, and I felt hugely proud, and grateful for the opportunity I had been given.

It is also where I met colleagues who quickly became friends. Above all, I had the feeling of discovering a world I belonged to, one where I truly had my place.

For a first experience in the games industry, I couldn’t have asked for better.