I have been employed with Larian Studios between November 2022 and September 2023, as an Intern Producer, to help with the workloads of both the ‘Cinematic Animation’ and ‘UI/UX’ departments in the final year of production. It was requested that I transferred from the former to the latter when the workload balance shifted and the UI/UX team would benefit more from the extra manpower, and the skills and knowledge that I had gained from my time with the Cine-Anim team.
I joined both of these teams during greatly busy times and, as such, was thrown in the deep end – learning a large amount in a very short period of time. In this time, I gained significant experience with Spreadsheets, Jira, Shotgrid, Perforce and bespoke internal tools.
I have worked extensively with QA teams, external vendors, and multiple other departments / producers to ensure that goals are met and blockers are resolved, and have had the chance to work alongside and learn from an incredibly talented team.
A significant benefit of working as part of both the Cine-Anim and UI/UX teams is that I've had experience working in both vertical and lateral workflows:
Within the Cine-Anim team, I've worked with in-house animators (across multiple worldwide studios), external teams, the performance capture team, the Cinematic Art department, and other cinematic producers to ensure that:
-----
- Animations would be delivered, at the right point in the pipeline, for Cine-Art, VFX and SFX to complete the cinematics.
– The animators had the correct mocap to work with, and gave the performance capture team the relevant information for each required animation
- Any animations that did not initially go through an in-house animator were clean, in-sync and working as intended.
-----
Additionally, I took part in meetings that would detail the co-ordination and creative direction of various cinematics between the Cine-Anim, Cine-Art, VFX and SFX departments. Furthermore, I would share the responsibility of running scrums and one-to-ones with the cine-anim team members worldwide.
Working with UI/UX, I would often need to discuss information / feedback with other departments, to make sure any changes would correctly reflect the intentions of these departments. For example, if we received feedback that meant we needed to update a tooltip (example below), I would liaise with the writing and design departments to ensure that the system's design, the written description, and the UI design all reflected each-other correctly.
Whereas cine-anim mainly required the use of Google Sheets and Shotgrid, the UI/UX team focused more on using Jira for Agile processes. Additionally, we would organise times to play through sections of the game together to focus on the player experience / perspective (and to find issues unique to multiplayer / splitscreen).
Example of a tooltip in BG3
Across both departments, the software I used and the tasks I needed to perform built a large range of skills:
Within Google Sheets, I used a variety of formulae to collect and filter huge networks of data into useful and readable information to help the team tackle both the depth and breadth of their tasks. In general, these sheets helped track progress, key production information, and data discrepancies, all of which are important to keep a close eye on when dealing with such a large amount of data; recently (as of writing), Larian has released information stating that Baldur’s Gate III contains ~174 hours of cinematic footage.
I’ve also spent a large amount of time within Jira and Shotgrid as a more versatile way of feature tracking. Where Sheets are great for visualising the data and finding even the smallest missing details, Shotgrid and Jira are key for tracking, updating and getting in-depth information on individual tasks
Although I cannot say much publicly about Larian’s in-house tools, using them alongside Sheets and Shotgrid has been vital in my production duties. Previous to Larian, I could only gain experience with a variety of third-party programs and websites – this has given me useful experience working with internal tools.