Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is a 2017 video game based on the Planet of the Apes franchise that takes place between Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
I worked for 12 months as Lead Animator on Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier and lead a team of eight animators and extra support staff over that period.
With Imaginati being a start-up studio, there was no pre existing animation pipeline to work with which meant developing something entirely new for the project we were developing while simultaneously creating content and hitting milestones. The Director was intent on creating the entire edit inside of Unreal Engine using Sequencer which meant we needed a way of importing rough animation into Unreal, and once the edit had been created, extracting the data along with any new camera and timecode data for recreation inside MotionBuilder and Maya for animation refinement.
I worked very closely with our external Pipeline TD and programmers throughout the entire process to help plan the development of the tools as well as prevent issues and solve any unexpected surprises that we encountered along the way.. of which there were many
Aside from the technical aspect of the job, I was creatively responsible for all the animation within the game and worked closely with the Director and Art Director to ensure the animation complemented their artistic visions. I also worked closely with The Imaginarium who not only published the game and provided motion capture facilities but also motion edited the majority of the project. I would provide assistance with technical issues as well as any specific animation direction when changes were required.
Unfortunately due to the scope of the project and size of the animation team, I wasn’t able to produce any final animation on the project but I did do some tests in the beginning and created the above work from those tests.
