Responsibilities
Art Direction
My job as Art Director on Dead Island 2 was to create the second installment of the franchise following the family recipe of gallons of blood, mounds of rotting flesh and insane makeshift weapons and give it a new twist, bathing the whole thing in dark humor and Californian sunshine.
Together with a small crew of concept artists and some hired help from outside studios, we hammered out the gruesome rules of the world, setting the visual benchmarks for all the fun to come. I also ran a large horde of in-house artists and animators, putting my final judgement on every bit of gore, guts and metal bits, making sure the quality was up to snuff before their creations were unleashed.
My real joy, though, was playing mad scientist, obsessed with finding new ways to make the carnage better technically and artistically, breaking and rebuilding our process, inventing better tools and refining our methods until every smashed skull and blood-splattered wall was a work of art that lived up to our vision.
- The project was cancelled in July 2015 -
Movies
Cinematic Trailer
I worked with the twisted minds at AxisAnimation to give the world its first look at our project. Together, we cooked up the cinematic trailer that dropped at E3 in 2014.
I gave them the complete rundown of our visual direction, along with benchmark art concepts and in-game assets. I then reviewed every stage of their work, my obsessive eye ensuring that their work looked just as grotesquely beautiful as the in-game slaughter.
Gameplay Trailer
The "Sunshine and Slaughter" gameplay trailer, which escaped into the wild in August 2014, is the sole surviving piece of gameplay footage.
Captured from an early pre-alpha build, it doesn't represent the true, horrific fidelity of a final product. Yet, it's a perfect little peek showing off some of our initial experiments in zombie design, player characters, makeshift weapons, and a few truly disturbing bosses. It's a taste of the vile, ironic mood to come.
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