Widunder

Time for part 3! This time around it’s time for a lot of GRIN (R.I.P).
Album choice this evening is: Samurai Champloo Soundtrack.

I had one month left at Massive, and I used all of my time looking for new jobs. Sending out lots of application everywhere. After a while I got an answer from the Lead Animator at GRIN (Now famous for Bionic Commando Rearmed, Bionic Commando, Wanted, Terminator Salvation) in Stockholm. He told me he liked my application and wanted me to do an animation test. The test was animating a guy climbing up on a wall and jumping down on the other side. Classic (and good) exercise of weight and timing. I did this during my last week at Massive, which was very hectic. So I had a hard time to focus since I had to think about moving out of my apartment that I recently had moved into. In the end, the result was so-so in my opinion. Unfortunately I do not have access to the video at this time, but I will updated this post and include it when I gain access to it once again (My computer is in Sweden and I’m currently in Poland, gg ey?).

Grin Logo

In any event, it was appearently good enough as I was invited for an interview in Stockholm. The following week after I moved back to my parents place (again, sigh..) and after a couple of days it was the day before the interview. I went up to Stockholm by bus which took me about 4 hours. Once in Stockholm I spent the night with an old friend of mine.
On the day of the interview I tagged along my friend on the metro, as it was a work day. We parted ways and I went towards the GRIN-offices in the middle of Stockholm. I was several hours early as my friend started work at 9 but the interview was scheduled at 11.  I walked around, looking into random shops browsing random stuff, trying to settle down my nervousness. It didn’t help at all.

The actual interview went really well. This time around it was a more friendly meeting than an actual interview. The Lead Animator took me around the entire office, I got to say hello to some people and I met some of my friends that I had studied with in College. We sat down in a conference room and we looked at my animation test and at my demo reel. He talked about what he liked and didn’t like about it. We talked about what I liked to work with and what it was like at Massive. When he asked me why I didn’t get to keep my job I was honest and told him the truth. He said he appreciated my honesty and we went on talking about other relevant stuff like how they worked at GRIN and that I would work Terminator Salvation if I got the job, the official game for the upcoming movie. I wasn’t really thrilled about this as license games rarely turn out any good at all, but at the same time I’m a fan of the movies (the first two anyways) and it’s a brand that is well known so I wasn’t disappointed either. He told me he wanted to place me in the newly started studio down in Gothenburg, where Terminator was being developed. Which I was totally okay with, since I didn’t have any ties anywhere. At the end of the interview he told me that he really thinked I was good for the job and that he would recommend me to the Gothenburg Studio.

A couple of days later, back at home, I was invited for an interview down in Gothenburg. Down there, I got to meet the producer, assistant producer and the Senior Animator (the Lead in Stockholm was also the Lead for the Animators in Gothenburg). This interview was more by the book, like the interviews at Massive. But they where very friendly, asking standard questions like who I was and what I enjoyed to work with, what my strentghts and weaknesses was, etc. They seemed pleased with my answers, and I felt very confident at the time. Before we parted they told me that they would be in touch with a decision, hopefully within a week.

A week passed and no call, so I decided to call them instead. I was told that the Senior Animator was on vacation so they hadn’t come to a decision yet. But that they would most certainly call me during this coming week.
Another week passed and still not a word from them, so I called them once more and asked about the status. They still had not made a decision. And this time the producer asked me to call him again during the next week, since it worked so well. So I called him again the next week, and gladly they had decided to hire me! I had to wait a long time for a decision but it had been worth it of course, it felt really good to be hired again.

Terminator Salvation

28th of July 2008, my first day at GRIN.
It was Monday. I had used the weekend to move into an furnished apartment which was located in the outskrits Gothenburg in the town of Partille. It took about 10 minutes by commuter train, so it was alright.
When I arrived at the office I was greeted by the Producer of the studio and he showed me around the office. There was around 26 people working there, so not quite as large as Massive (130 people when I left).
I was left at my desk and with the Senior Animator. I greeted the other two Animators and sat down at my desk. My Senior Animator told me to set up my computer and to install a lot of GRIN specific tools, to be able to work with the engine. I got a couple of DVD’s with Motion Builder tutorials. As this was the  main software the used for Animation at GRIN I had to learn it. I watched the DVD’s which took me the rest of the first and the second day, and the third day I began cleaning motion capture and tweaking animations. It felt really good to be able to start working so soon, and with a completetly new animation software that I had never used before.

Animating with motion capture for the first time was also quite different from animating “by hand”. With motion capture you get a rough animation that some actor has acted out, while being recorded. The data you get is very realistic and detailed, but there is always some issues with the data. Such as foots not touch the floor, attaching hands to the weapon, or the character not moving exactly as you want him to in order to blend to other animations in the game. So you have to edit it and make it look like you want to. I enjoyed it instantly and felt like I got a lot of things done quickly, since the Motion Capture data gave a sort of “start kit” for each animation.

Motionbuilder - scene obviously not from Terminator

The Terminator Salvation project was very enjoying, at first. My first thought was that we would be able to pull of a pretty neat game. Unfortunately GRIN thought it was a mighty fine idea to change leads, designers and producers in the middle of the project. In short; a lot of changes were made. People quit their jobs and other people were very disappointed because they lost the lead role or because of changes that were made for the game. All in all, I don’t really know if the game would’ve been that much better if they didn’t change everything. We basically only had 6 months to complete it, and because of all the changes there was alot of things that had to be done with on an extremtly tight schedule. But before all the changes were made the game felt kind of out of focus. There wasn’t anything about the game that was solid. It had no “core features” so to speak. This is just my personal opinion of course, if any of the other developer on Terminator reads this; please share your thoughts in the comments!

However, I feel that we did a good job conisdering the time that was given. The gameplay in the game is alright. It’s not brilliant and the game is very, very short. But still, for being developed on basically 6 months we did alright. Of course, it wasn’t only the Gothenburg studio that worked on this. There was a lot of people from the Stockholm studio on this, as well as Streamlines studios. Plus another couple of out sourcing companies.
During this project I got to experience the pain of making a movie based game for real. We had extremely little time to make the game and this is very, very common for movie based games. I long for the day when movie publishers can plan ahead and not just realizing during the last minute “oh! We need a game as well!”.

Shortly after the Terminator project was done, we got started on the next one. This is still unnanounced so unfortunately I can’t talk about it in detail. I will say however that it was a project for Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network that the entire studio was very, very entusiastic about. I finally felt that I was going to be a part of making a game that I would want to play myself, one I would’ve bought if not working on it.

We really enjoyed the starting of our new project. We really felt that this would become a killer game. And the new games that was being developed at the Stockholm studio and Barcelona studio was really interesting as well. Unforunately, Terminator Salvation, Wanted (game based on the movie, developed by the Barcelona studio) and even Bionic Commando turned out to sell very bad, as well as getting poor reviews, it wasn’t really difficult to see that something wasn’t going the way that GRIN had planned. A lot of stuff happened during the next few weeks and months. We got a very very low yearly salary increase, projects was cancelled in the Barcelona studio, etc.

One day our office manager called to a meeting, he told us that the studio was going to be closed down. As well as the Barcelona studio. I was obviously very saddened by this, as this was my first real job in the industry that I really enjoyed. I worked with real talented people on great projects, and I enjoyed my life I had there. It felt really awful to know that I would probably never work with the same team again, and that everybody had lost their jobs. In total around 100 people lost their jobs. 30 people in Gothenburg and 70 people in Barcelona. GRIN thought that they would survive their crisis if they got rid of some of the bigger expenses. As it turns out they did not make it, GRIN went bankrupt about one month after that the other studios was closed down. Really sad to see one of the biggest Swedish developers go down.

Also, I hated to be back to square one. I had to create a portfolio and search for new jobs again. Okay, not square one since I got some more experience this time around. But it’s never fun to hunt for jobs. This was in July 2009.

End of part 3!
Next part is about getting my current job! Finally!