Bradford Hillam

Technical Artist, Cinematic Design & Story Development

Cinematic Technical Art From Ascendant Studios

Cinematic designer role focusing on implementing real-time cinematic content in collaboration with the animation and level design teams.

+ Led initial setup of cinematics in sequencer, implementing animations, cameras, including creating level instances, triggers, and actors.

+ Authored cameras and actor performances for interactive dialog.

+ Created seamless transitions between gameplay and cinematics. Collaborating with level design.

+ The go-to person for Animation, Audio, VFX, and Lighting to assist in creating great cinematic scenes in-game; while maintaining the Director’s vision.

+ Identify and fix bugs in cinematics, propose workflows and methodologies to speed up and bulletproof the production process.

"Ability to work independently, problem solve on the fly, and collaborate efficiently across disciplines in a small, fast moving team. Great time management as well as written and verbal communication skills."



Visual DIrecting Works from Pocket Gems 

 This is a selected collection of the visual directing work I did on the Episode series of games from Pocket Gems. Most series ranged from 15 to 20 episodes of about 15-20 minutes in length. This work was scripted entirely from the code side before being compiled and reviewed, not in a visual editor/engine.

Video game cinematics from Telltale Games

This is a collection of the cinematography work I did as a cinematic artist. All work was set up and edited in the TellTale Game Engine. Titles included are Tales from the Borderlands, Games of Thrones, Walking Dead, and The Wolf Among Us

Tales from the Borderlands

Created the Fiona frame story intro from first pass through release. This included camera and character blocking & layout. Incorporating the name card into the scene. And swapping costumes set and environment for the flashback sequences. The polish team modified some cameras at 0:39 which is why the sand on the floor looks odd.

Incorporated redesigns and new writing for Sasha. The character traits for Sasha were changed between the game demo and release so I needed to swap and trim most of the shots to reflect the writing and character mood changes. Mostly involved reworking shots without breaking the existing continuity.

Streamlined writing and timing changes after the demo. As well as working with the content programmers to make sure all the new and revised objects were working properly.

 

Game of Thrones

Created the Frostfinger intro from first pass through rescoping and release. I did the camera blocking and character layout from the beginning. About 3/4th of the way through a chunk of the sequence was cut so I had to figure out a reason for Frostfinger to move around without it being too weird.

 

The Walking Dead Season 2

Worked on this in the early days of the scene. Mostly camera blocking, layout, and scene pacing. Most of the actual character positioning remained but the acting cues were moved. The Arvo struggle I planned still remained mostly intact.

Handled from blocking through ratings. The sequence was cut down a fair amount. But most everything except the acting polish remains.

 

The Wolf Among Us

Created this scene from blocking & layout through polish. This was the penultimate shot in the series so there a lot of conditionals to work around, depending on choices. I think there were four separate character stations that needed to flow into each other.

Handled from blocking through polish (toad conversation polish only). A small team ended up working on this scene due to scheduling conflicts. So my contribution started with about half of the total but then got pushed down to a small conversation.

Mostly first pass camera and character blocking.