If I think back to a few years ago, I didn’t really like working on scenes with flying characters or vehicles. I much preferred scenes on the ground. When your character is on the ground and you’re creating a scene in a realistic style, you’re naturally restricted by the physical capabilities of the character. Movement is limited in terms of speed and usually happens along two axes because the ground itself serves as a boundary.
In the air, you gain a third axis of movement and the freedom to define speed and trajectory, which sounds great in theory but, in practice, significantly increases the chances of making “mistakes” or creating unnatural, unrealistic motion. Additionally, there often aren’t many objects around to help convey a sense of speed. It’s similar to looking out of a plane window, where the world appears to move slowly even though your actual speed is around 900 km/h. And on top of that, in real-time cinematics you can’t go too crazy with the speed – it still needs to feel believable and technically feasible within the game engine. The challenge becomes even greater when you’re working on a cinematic with a single, bespoke camera. You have to maintain the feeling of speed over long distances and time without relying on cuts or editing techniques.
In such cases, you end up working a lot with the relative movement of the camera, the field of view, background/foreground elements when possible, and balancing the speed and trajectory of the action. You don’t have the same limitations that ground scenes provide – limitations that actually make things easier by giving you a framework to work within.
After breaking my brain multiple times trying to solve these challenges for specific scenes, I can now say I’ve grown to enjoy working on them. They’re always a challenge, but that’s what makes them so rewarding, and they really push you to improve your skills.
One such scene is the opening cinematic for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – Secrets of the Spires, which was released recently. I had the opportunity to work on it as a Senior Cinematic Designer alongside amazing professionals, from the previs stage all the way through polishing and implementation. In this scene, players get to see their character entering a breathtaking and stunning new region on their ikran.
I’m truly happy with the result we accomplished together with such a talented team of specialists, directors, and managers, to whom I would like to express my gratitude. And a special thank you to the people I worked with on a daily basis – thank you for your help, great atmosphere and exciting process. This was a great collaboration! And I’m looking forward to new challenges! 🙂
07.02.2025