I worked as a freelance animator for Velan Studios on the video game Knockout City. This work took place over two summers, during my academic breaks, and was essentially full-time during those periods. Knockout City was published by Electronic Arts on May 21, 2021, and released on Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The game was a major success, played by over 12 million people worldwide.

Velan is a prestigious studio in the video game industry, with a highly competitive hiring process. As a professor, I have been very intentional about keeping one foot in the game development industry. This keeps my skills sharp, and ensures that I stay up to date with current tools, workflows, and best practices. I bring this experience into the classroom, and continually update my courses with my latest industry knowledge.

As an example, on the Velan project I learned more about the Advanced Skeleton rigging toolkit, how to use Studio Library, (a tool for managing poses and animation), and professional Slack best practices for creative teams. In addition to classroom teaching, my knowledge of Advanced Skeleton and Studio Library was tremendously useful when I later worked on That Damn Goat, as we used those tools extensively for that project.

The animation reel posted below features work I created for Knockout City. I created all the animation shown—none of the modeling or other 3D asset work. Most of the clips are still in the blocking phase and lack in-between frames. My role was to develop new animation ideas and create key poses. I was able to polish some of these animations further, but in many cases, junior animators at Velan later completed the in-betweening and final polish

My work on Knockout City has been disseminated internationally and peer reviewed; details are listed on my Presentations/Publications page.

Knockout City

My Velan animation reel

This animation pose I created was used for the thumbnail of the official gameplay trailer posted by EA.