While I’m mostly known for cinematic work, I’ll never turn down an opportunity to use my motion graphic skills in cool and exciting ways.
Case in point – our weapons team needed someone to design their sniper scope HUDs (Heads Up Display). So working with Art Director Kevin Duc, I went about conceptualizing and previsualizing the scopes for each weapon manufacturer. Hell yeah.
If you’re unfamiliar with weapon manufacturers in the Borderlands series, they’re corporations who supply the galaxy with a wide array of death-dealing tech. Heavily competing with one another, each manufacturer maintains distinct capabilities to stand out from the pack.
My challenge was to ensure an equal amount of distinction in how each HUD looked and felt. Updating and evolving the look for preexisting manufacturers was certainly fun but designing a brand new HUD from scratch was a LOT cooler.
Example: The Children of the Vault are completely new to the Borderlands series. A rag-tag and dangerous group, their weapons are decidedly low-tech: the very definition of kit-bashed and cobbled together from whatever parts happen to be lying around. So, springboarding from that bit of world building, Kevin and I spoke at length about low-tech UI’s and that led to our mutual love of old vector monitors; as seen in classic arcade machines like Tempest, Battlezone, and Asteroids. That would be my touchstone and you can see the influences in both the previs and the final game. And yes, I know this video says “sniper scopes” but the COV only have scopes on assault rifles. Deal with it.
Development Details:
What you see in the video above are previs demonstrations that were mocked up well ahead of any finalized weapons. I would first record game footage of me wielding a Jakobs/DAHL/ Maliwan/whoever – usually walking up to a target, switching to the non-existent scope view, killing that target, and then popping back out. This allowed me to demonstrate the full flow & feel of introducing the scope design as if it were happening in game. It was also easy to knock footage out while prepping each design.
There’s a lot of detail I could go into regarding the specific design-needs for each scope but I ain’t got that kind of time right now. Maybe later.
Having designed the vector art for each scope, I then bring it into After Effects along with the scope game footage and proceed to composite, animate, and VFX (
