Senior A/V Media Designer
2019 - Present
Here at CA, my position requires the type of flexibility I love with the amount of different assignments that get given to the video team. With such a variety of projects, I try to put that passion in every video we do. I’m immensely proud that my work has been used for various purposes for and by some of the biggest publishers around.
Being able to go from a motion graphics driven project to a straight 20 minute milestone video edit is one of my favorite things here. You can never know exactly what a new project will bring, and that’s exciting to me! In the 4 years I’ve been at Certain Affinity in the Studio Support type role, I’ve gotten to work on two released products and some unanounced ones. I’ve gotten to create internal hype reels for projects, videos for partner developer teams to see our work, create original temp video assets for vertical slice builds, capture footage in engine and in builds to use in various forms, make UR testing content for testers to be introduced to new mechanics quickly and much more.
Obviously most of what I’ve done day to day for the last 4 years is internal only, so you can only take my word for how cool and “professional af” these videos were (That’s a real piece of partner feedback!), but I did bring with me some of my favorite public facing videos I’ve gotten to make, and am happy to go more in detail on project responsibilities further.
2023 Certain Affinity Sizzle Reel
This project was months in the making and a cross-departmental effort. I started with the 2019 reel we had previously made before I got here, and had access to all previously approved footage. I had the pitch for the “line” in the timeline to be the bookends of the reel, showing the time progress at the beginning, and being the culmination to make the logo at the end. The initial timeline concept was inspired by Bungie’s “O Brave New World” documentary and their use of timeline graphics. With our Graphic Designer Cierra Lagges’ awesome image of our keyart tiled across the years, I brought the PSD in and organized all the layers to be After Effects friendly and animated a 3D camera layer to pan the timeline. Each tile has its own animation down the line until we get to present day and we zoom in to New World. To initially pitch the idea, I did it all in a static layer controlled by a null, redoing the animation when it passed all necessary channels. Eventually redoing the composition in a 3D environment, it resulted in a 135 layer After Effects composition.
Syncing each title to the track I chose using our music service partner was definitely the most fun part of the project, and I was finally able to add the “bullets timed to music” hit I’ve always wanted to. Taking the same footage we used in our 2019 reel and giving it a new feel was also a unique challenge I was happy to face head on. I’m super proud of where the reel ended up!
“CAN I TRY SOMETHING?”
Albeit a simple one, Certain Affinity’s “Ask The Devs” title sequence is one of my proudest examples of how my self-motivation and obsessed mind led to an internal pitch and an elevation of the series that we had been playing around with for a little while.
For this series, we were using footage recorded with many topics in bulk. We had used the footage previously for a couple of other videos, and wanted to use the rest of the footage piece by piece showcasing some of the best and most asked questions, “What advice do you have for newcomers?” being a good example.
I had the edit done, and it just ended up being people answering questions with no real purpose, no through-line to give the topics structure. After a few days thinking about it on walks, in the shower and laying in bed, it dawned on me the videos didn’t have an umbrella, a series name. I took a note from some of my favorite YouTube channels and gave it a name and a short, snappy intro. I pitched the animation in rough form to my boss and he liked the idea, cleared it, and little by little we formed the branding for the series “Ask the Devs”
Certain Affinity MURAL TIMELAPSE
So this is cool for a lot of reasons. First off, coming in for about 10 weekends including the final touches and watching this huge mural get painted is cool in and of itself, but when my boss handed me the footage, we decided this would be an experimental video. We were playing around in different editing software and so this project was handed to me with the idea that I’d play around in DaVinci Resolve to edit this piece in. So that’s exactly what I did! This was the first video I ever edited in Resolve (so far still my only one!), but I’m really proud of how the time remapping, timelapse footage editing, and coloring of the footage ended out! We recolored most of the footage to really make the colors pop and pushed the values to help sell the video of how it looks in person!
I really enjoy this video as it showcases my further progress and learning in the company!