Many of you who have already played Saints Row 2 know this as the scene where the Ronin are holding Aisha hostage in her house, and a gigantic fight ensues. Internally, we called it “House Party” while it was in development.
Creating this monumental action scene was a huge effort on everyone’s part, from writing, to level design, sound design, effects, tech artists, and of course the cinematic artists.
The first (and admittedly ugly) step was an unusual one- was to design the level that this fight scene was to take place. I got together with the writer, Steve Jaros, to plan things out.
We started with a top down outline of Aisha’s house. The interior wasn’t designed yet. This scene was the most complex fight scene that Volition had done to date, so we knew we had to design the level around the fight, and not the other way around.
After going through the script’s fight scene numerous times, we eventually ended up with this rough outline of what would happen, and where. The position of nearly every piece of furniture has a function in the scene, say for Ronin or PC to hide behind, or to allow some character a necessary line of sight to see or shoot at someone, or to provide cover.
Messy layout of Aisha House Interior
The top-down is pretty gross, I know. It’s more of a visual organization tool than a work of art -but it served its purpose in helping me to plan the scene.
I handed this off to the level designer, who built some temporary interior geometry for me, so I could work on the animatic without having to wait for the final level art.
After a couple months of work, the animatic was finished. It wouldn’t have taken as long, but I had to juggle cinematic artist coordination, managing schedules, and art reviews along with House Party’s creation.
Concept art of Aisha's House Interior
The animatic was created completely in 3DSMax 9, along with some of Volition’s proprietary camera tools. Note that all of the cameras and edits were created linearly- with no NLE system to be found in Max, I had to create all of the cuts as I created the animatic. I was editing as I was animating, basically. During this step it is extremely important to get camera timing correct. Say if you needed to shorten camera 2 by only five frames, but you have 1500 frames of animation after that camera, you have to move all of the rest of the keyframes back by five frames as well. Trying to keep the camera and biped keyframes and link contstraints synched together from such a simple edit could take hours.
For all of the difficulty in creating the animatic though, if you compare this to the final product, you’ll see we stayed amazingly close to the original vision. The camera cuts, determined months earlier in Max, are mostly frame-accurate to the final in-game sequence.