The first thing on this real is a demo we did the weekend before the 2005 E3 Convention. Our original demo was axed at the eleventh hour so we all worked through the weekend to pull it together. It was kind of crazy, but I think the end product turned out pretty nice. I keyframed all the shots of Sean Alexander with his helmet off.
On “Madden o7”, in conjunction with other things, I keyframed about twenty specific run styles for some of the NFL’s marquee players. I looked for specific characteristics on each player’s sprint. Jamal Lewis for example, has an upright running style when he’s kicking it into high gear. Tiki Barber early in his career was known as a fumbler. To alleviate the problem, he developed a way of running where he would minimize the movement of his ball carrying hand in high traffic areas.
NFL Tour
NFL Tour from Jimmy Jackson on Vimeo.
”NFL Tour” is EA’s latest venture in arcade football in the tradition of the “NFL Street” series. As expected, “NFL Tour” delivered bigger than life hits, but in addition it also introduced a reversible tackle/broken tackle system. The design allowed each tackle or broken tackle in game to be countered or reversed depending on the game player’s timing with his/her controller. It proved to be quite a challenging puzzle to put together from an animation perspective, but was quite rewarding as well.
NFL Street 2
NFL Street 2 from Jimmy Jackson on Vimeo.
NFL Street 2” was the first project I worked on after coming to EA, and it was the most fun. We had a great team atmosphere, and a wonderful art director who allowed lots of freedom to explore. Not to mention, it’s always fun to push reality.
Stye catches are pretty self explanatory. The objective was to exaggerate the catch if the game player pushed the style button, thus gaining more style points for the user. The tricky part was that we couldn’t change the frame on which the catch occurred. Because of this, it could make our timing a little tricky. We also needed to make sure that the position in space where the catch occurred, didn’t change from the non-stylized version to the stylized versions of the catch.
The “Own the City “ stuff was done at the very end of production. There had originally been a story mode designed for the game, but when “NFL Street 2” went from a two year cycle to a one year cycle it was cut. However, as the game began to evolve it became obvious that a story mode would help round-out the game play experience. So, back in it went. A majority of these scenes were keyframed. However, if I was able to find existing motion capture that could help me get started, I would use it as a foundation on which to build the rest of the scene.
One of the designs for NFL Street 2 was that if the user earned a “Gamebreaker 2”, a predetermined scripted scene would play. I don’t think game reviewers liked it too much, but they were fun to animate. For the most part we would piece together existing animations to create the scenes, but like on the “Own the City”, we would fill in the gaps by keyframing.