Welcome back to the final installment in a three-part series of blog posts speaking to the Animation Leadership Team at Dambuster Studios.
This series will introduce you to three members of the Animation Leadership Team. It will give you an insight into their chosen specialisms, an understanding of their days and weeks at Dambuster, and some of the reasons behind why they entered their field.
In the first part, we spoke to Lead Technical Animator, Daniele Cattaneo, which you can catch up on here
The second part was all about Lead Gameplay Animator, Stuart Owen, which you can find here
In this post, we’ll be chatting to Rich.
An Introduction from Rich Holleworth
I’m Rich, the Performance Capture Lead for Dambuster Studio’s Animation Department. I’ve been with the company for five years now.
Previously, I taught on the Visual Effects B.A., and developed the Games, Design, and Animation course for the University of West London; was the CTO and Co-Founder of The Imaginarium – a London-based boutique performance capture studio; and have worked as a Technical Animator at a large independent game developer here in the East Midlands. Outside of work, I like watching classic films in my elaborate home cinema or tinkering in my workshop.
What Does a Typical Day/Week Look Like for You?
In motion capture, there’s no such thing. One week might be R&D and tools development, another might be planning and organisation, and another would be post-processing and preparing capture data for our animators, but my favourites are when we’re on the stage working with the actors to create new creatures, characters, and cutscenes.
What Motivated You to Pursue a Career in Animation and Ultimately Lead a Team in the Games Industry?
It was a number of things: I’ve always been interested in film, theatre, and performance, but also, I grew up watching Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animations and always wondered how to make the impossible. When it came to university, I chose a course that combined media studies, film & TV production, and computer animation.
It was here doing some abortive post-grad studies that I got roped into helping with the department’s new mocap system – on account of my extra-curricular work as a theatrical technician. I’ve pursued a career in mocap ever since as it’s the crossing point of high-tech VFX production techniques and performance, enabling a human to give life and character to digital creatures.
What Qualities Do You Believe Are Essential to Be a Successful Leader in Your Role?
When planning for mocap shoots, and especially effects involving performer safety, it’s important to be detail-oriented. On stage, high-speed improvisation and calmness under pressure are essential. And finally, A dual aim of mentoring and developing junior staff, and providing them with tools and working methods to let them focus on creative or meaningful work without getting lost in fiddly configurations or busy work.
How Do You Collaborate with Other Departments to Ensure a Cohesive and Immersive Player Experience?
When recording mocap for player or enemy motion, we work with the Animation Lead and appropriate Design Leads on stage. We have a high-quality real-time system, so the actor and other stakeholders can see motion on the game character immediately – and use this feedback to adapt and improve the performance or discover unexpected traits to develop. The technology enables the creativity.
[Rich assembling a platform for the performance capture actor to jump off]
What Do You Enjoy Most About Your Role?
Certainly, it’s working on stage with the actors and Animation Leads to bring new creatures to life or record an ambitious cutscene. For cutscenes, we employ performance capture technology – much like “Avatar” or “Planet of the Apes” – so face, body, and voice are all recorded together to ensure a consistent performance true to the actor’s intent on stage.
What Do You Enjoy Most About Dambuster?
The Leadership Group has a clear mission and communicates this well to the rest of the team, and the team – at all levels – has a collective goal that we’re all working towards. There is a great mix of skills, backgrounds, and creativity represented in the different departments that make up the studio.
Fancy Joining Us?
We hope that you enjoyed learning a little bit more about the life of a Performance Capture Lead at Dambuster Studios.
We’re always on the lookout for talented people to join us. If you are searching for a fresh challenge in the games industry, we have a number of open roles available on our website, take a look here.
If you missed the first two installments in this series, you can access them through the blog section of our website.
In part one, we spoke to Lead Technical Animator, Daniele Cattaneo, which you can read here.
Part two was a discussion with Lead Gameplay Animator, Stuart Owen, which you can find here