American McGee’s “Alice” Opening

Here’s the opening cut-scene we produced for American McGee’s “Alice” game. The final trailer came out a bit nicer, I think, but our constraints on the open were rather huge. We had something like a 10-page script worth of information to distill down to a couple of minutes, and a rather meager budget and time-table to boot. So I dreamed up a creative way to tell the story mostly through stills, with a dynamic camera to keep the animation costs/time as low as possible, and hopefully still keep most of the tension and drama.

Some beautiful matte paintings by Alex Laurent were used for the asylum bedding and the distressed snow outside, as well as the stills of young Alice. Matt Fassberg produced. I directed and pre-vis’d all, then animated, lit, and composited many of the scenes.