Star Wars Outlaws: A Pirate’s Fortune

Another game production under my belt. I started working on the expansion when I came back from maternity leave, in October 2024. Developed together with Massive Entertainment, the Ubisoft studio in Malmö, it was a great project to come back to, and that’s an understatement.

With my team in Annecy, we were on the cinematics. I got to animate three of them, and it’s exactly the kind of work I love: building a scene, working the characters’ acting, polishing every detail so it serves the story. Production wrapped in the spring of 2025, and the DLC shipped in May of the same year.

Cinematic 1: Kay has a plan…

On the first cinematic, where Hondo walks into the vault, the challenge was mostly Nix, because the schedule didn’t allow for animating the animal entirely in keyframe. I had to salvage pieces of animation from gameplay, string them together, and add a few keyframed chunks to smooth out the transitions. Only the facial expressions you see when he grabs onto the chest are new and keyframed, made specifically for the cinematic.

Then I had Kay and Hondo, captured in mocap along with the cameras. One of my guiding principles was to think in terms of the technology available at the time of the first Star Wars films. In the seventies and eighties, cameras weren’t the same, nor as precise, and I worked the camera movement to convey that.

To finish with this cinematic, the work on Kay and Hondo was fairly basic. I added their facial animation in keyframe, since it wasn’t captured. Thankfully, you don’t see them up close very often. As for their bodies, the mocap data was good quality and the chest prop on the shoot was the right size, so cleaning up their movement was all it took.

Cinematic 2: To infinity and beyond

This cinematic was a real headache, though more on the technical side than the animation side. Because the ship take-off environment was so specific, I couldn’t reuse any animation this time. So I animated the ship in keyframe, a first for me. I’m more used to living creatures, and it was fascinating to work out the mechanics and the physics that would make this kind of vehicle fly.

The whole difficulty was hiding the seams. In a Star Wars game, a golden rule is to give the sense of a single open world where you travel from planet to planet. That wasn’t technically possible, so we used tricks to mask the different environments, especially while they were loading, so the player never feels like they’re changing level.

That was usually handled by the cinematics, which mask the levels loading in the background like a Photoshop layer. That was the whole difficulty of my scene: the transition between levels was genuinely complex. I couldn’t even explain it, but it made for great teamwork with other crafts. That’s what I love about this job: getting to talk things through with other departments is always instructive.

Cinematic 3: Cleared for take-off

For this ship take-off animation, again there was no time to animate in keyframe, even though the sequence is short and simple. I worked from the take-off animation of another ship, along with its camera, and adapted it to the dimensions and the environment of this one.

The work I did on these cinematics reminded me of my time at Wētā. It felt good to go back to animation processes centred on staging and acting. That kind of rigour, and the care given to every step, are things I deeply appreciate.

Star Wars is a universe I have loved for as long as I can remember. The films, the games, the lore — all of it is part of my culture, and part of what made me want to work in images. Contributing to that universe, even through a few cinematics in a DLC, is one of those experiences that give meaning to my job. A Pirate’s Fortune will probably remain one of my favourite projects of my whole career at Ubisoft.