Assassin’s Creed III Multiplayer

A year after Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, my very first project, I came back to Ubisoft Annecy, the studio that keeps the franchise’s multiplayer alive. I joined the animation team to bring the multiplayer personas to life, the playable assassins who each have their own weapon, silhouette and character.

What I animated

The scope covered all of combat: assassinations, executions, and the taunts you use to goad the other players. It also included locomotion, and that was a serious piece of work. In the main game, player movement is a sprawling, highly complex system, built around that signature ability to climb everywhere, and all of that machinery had to be adapted to each multiplayer character. Then there were the menu animations, the ones that have to make a character’s personality exist in just a few seconds. Those are the animations where I started to find myself. I understood, right at the start of my career, that bringing a character to life was what I loved most about this craft.

From the mocap shoot to the engine

We were responsible for our animations from start to finish, across the whole pipeline. It began with the brainstorm, hunting for ideas and filming ourselves to build references. Then came the shoot, where we took part in the motion capture sessions to guide the actors. After that we worked the data in MotionBuilder, with pure keyframe animation whenever a stunt was impossible to film. The last stretch was integration into the engine and testing, in constant contact with the game designers and gameplay programmers, so the animation would land in the game both beautiful and functional.

Personal favourite: Lady Maverick

Behind her socialite airs, Lady Maverick assassinates her opponents with her hairpin, and that was the whole challenge: making her kill without ever losing her poise. Coming up with fluid takedowns that almost feel choreographed, in the manner of a Black Widow, remains some of my favourite acting work.