Making Meaningful Games: High Production Values, Short Timescales.

The UK's National Film and Television School is one of the top film schools in the world. It provides a range of complementary 2 year postgraduate programmes in high level film-making and television production disciplines, including fiction directing, producing, editing, cinematography, production design, sound design, composing, screenwriting, animation, documentary, TV entertainment, digital effects, and games design and development. All these specialisms are taught at advanced MA level, and students combine their talents in collaborative exercises and in their final major graduation projects. Many of the resulting projects win a multitude of international awards, including a fair share of Oscars and Baftas through the years. Our alumni are globally recognised leaders in their fields.

Games is the newest course in the school, and itself involves a range of sub-specialisms. Making games requires expertise in art, animation, programming, design and producing. Our students need to rapidly acquire mastery in all these areas, while collaborating with other NFTS film and television disciplines such as sound design, composing, production design and screenwriting. This multi-disciplinary expertise is fully engaged to create highly innovative games projects with uncompromising production value, which ultimately seek to unlock the future potential of the medium. In short, we are aiming to 'change the game'.

NFTS Games Work-In-Progress Showreel 2013

In order for the students to become these multidisciplinary specialists, the games department researched a range of technical tools and techniques which would short-cut the development process without compromising quality. For software development, we focussed in on Unity3D as it enables excellence without low level software engineering. For human character animation, we needed to find a toolset and pipeline which enabled our students to rapidly create customisable, animatable, game-ready 3D digital character models so that character and drama-based game ideas can be rapidly designed and developed to the highest level of quality.

Our research led us to Reallusion iClone and the associated 3DXchange pipeline. This has enabled our students to create lifelike human character animation which can be deployed into their game compositions without the need for modelling and animating from scratch. It is the equivalent of a ready-made character art and animation department, which can produce customisable models and animate them to order at a high quality and adaptable specification.