Watch Dogs: Bad Blood

After the citizens of Watch Dogs, I stayed in its universe for the Bad Blood expansion, released in 2014. It tells a story running alongside the main game, through the eyes of T-Bone, one of its hackers.

This time, Ubisoft Annecy worked with Ubisoft Montreal on the cinematics. It was my very first cinematic: I was in charge of the motion editing for the two characters in the scene that closes Bad Blood, as well as the tracking and the facial animation.

Grounding the actors in the set

Mocap is an excellent tool for getting realistic, very high quality animation quickly. The downside is that the set surrounding the actors is extremely limited. Luckily we work with real performers, whose boundless imagination lets them immerse themselves in the context of a scene.

To push the performance further, motion editing brings in the small details that tie it to its context. It’s also needed quite simply because staging changes happen after the shoot, and the animation has to be reworked so the shot stays coherent.

Keyframing to lift the performance

One example on this cinematic is the moment when the screens all light up at once and blind the character. T-Bone turns his head away and closes his eyes to protect his sight. On the stage, none of those screens were there, so the performance had to be reworked to add that reaction, in the body but also in the face.

As with any motion editing work, the ground contacts and the contacts with props were reworked too. T-Bone also gets teleported from one spot to another at the very start of the cinematic, so his framing against the screens reads better.

Motion editing genuinely raises the quality of mocap data, well beyond simply working the contacts and cleaning up jitter or pops. Above all, when the direction and the staging change after the shoot, it avoids starting over from scratch.

It saves new takes on the mocap stage, which take a lot of organising, especially when the stage is on the other side of the country or abroad. One keyframe pass to add a reaction or adjust a movement, and it’s done.

The direction I wanted to take

Until then, my projects had revolved around gameplay animations: very short, chopped up animations triggered by the game code, leaning more towards technique than creativity.

Cinematics are another story. You still have to respect the actors’ performance and the artistic direction, but there is far more room for creativity.

Working on a long action, tied to a set and carrying real meaning, made me realise this was the direction I wanted to take my career in.

Bad Blood was a single scene, but it left me with a clear wish: to work on many more cinematics.