Cinematics, as a name, worked fine for the studio’s infancy. After all, we began as a game cinematics and animation studio, so it made perfect sense to call ourselves exactly that. Like when I named my cat, Cat, and my hermit crab, Mister Hermit Crab. Same logic. However, after three years as a studio, we have produced all manner of game art, building several dream teams of concept artists, asset modelers, VFX artists, character modelers, technical artists, and of course, animators. While our animation team is as strong as ever, our other teams have built a reputation themselves for producing Triple A work for Triple A titles. I can honestly say after sixteen years in the game industry, this is the best team I have ever worked with and I am proud to represent and serve them to the best of my ability.

So why the name change? Cinematics is too specific. It no longer represents the studio accurately. We still have a great cinematics team. In fact, a much more experienced and overall better cinematics team than before. Cinematics just happens to be one team of many around here and I want to make sure our game art is given equal time in the spotlight.

So what else is changing? Much of the change has already happened. As I mentioned before, we have expanded greatly in the last year alone and will continue to expand as long as we maintain a comfortable size. Our teams have experienced massive amounts of work on many great games. We have focused on the things that matter most to both our team and clients. This is quality, reliability and creativity. Our current clients have experienced all of this first hand and continue to rely on us as an extension of their in-house team. This will only get better.

What do we have planned for 2011? Well, I’m glad you asked. Education is a huge priority for us. On top of our commitment to producing the best work possible, we plan on contributing greatly to the education of future game artists and animators in Portland. We currently work very closely with the Art Institute of Portland, giving students valuable work experience and on the job training. Moving forward we plan on expanding this training to include more talks and workshops where students can hone their skills in specific disciplines such as concept art, character design, modeling and texturing and animation. Our mo-cap studio is still in its infancy but we are also set to become an official course at the AI for mocap training.

Producing more passion projects is a huge goal for us this year as well. We are currently in production of our first animated short set to debut this spring or early summer. These hyper-creative internal projects allow us to push ourselves to produce the best work possible, and help us to develop more efficient and organized pipelines for future client projects. This will be the first year you will see what our team can do, given full creative license on a project.

More work with independent games on the ipad and iphone! Being gamers ourselves, we have a soft spot for independent games and considering we are in the Golden Age of the independent developer, we are diving head first into this amazing new age of creativity. We have had a great experience working with independent developers this last year and we will continue to expand this portion of the studio. We have special deals in place to help make it possible for independent developers to have a solid art team to partner up with. There is no reason why a great game shouldn’t have great art to compliment it.

We will also continue to focus on creating the best ethical work environment for our team members. One that is conducive to culture, creativity and productivity. We want to make sure that if you are a talented game artist living in Portland, that Supergenius will always be the number one studio to work for.

So why Supergenius? Pbbbtt. Duh. Why not?

Another great relationship we have fostered has been with the Art Institute of Portland.  They have been a valuable partner in helping to establish Portland as viable destination for game development and entertainment in general. Our work experience program has us working closely with student interns, helping to sharpen their skills and allowing them to actually get their hands dirty on some games.  This way they can enter the industry with a title or two under their belts and kick start their new careers with a bang.  As long as the Art Institute keeps churning out young fresh talent we will continue to corrupt them with our video games, toilet humor and rock music.

Since you are reading this you probably noticed some changes to the face of Cinematics.  We decided to kick off 2010 with a fresh new website and animation reel, showcasing a few of the great projects we worked on last year.  The website also has a few more bells and whistles, such as this blog, for instance.  We are very excited about this new forum where we can voice our thoughts and experiences at the studio and hopefully entertain a few readers in the process.  The Artist Profile Series will be posted here, along with studio news and updates and we will also get to hear from our team members who will be contributing their thoughts and experiences as well.  Expect to see some useful tutorials from our animators, maybe a project diary or two and if anything, just plain goofiness, which we can always use a little more of.

We’ve also reached our dirty little hands into the world of social networking so you can become a fan of us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or soften your brain with our videos on Youtube and Vimeo.  Is there no end to this manifest destiny of animation madness?  No, my friend.  Not even close.

A very special thanks to everyone we have met and worked with in 2009.  To the amazing and talented artists and animators who have joined our team and are continually helping to make us the best game animation studio in the world.  To the incredibly friendly, intrepid and rock solid clients who have trusted us with their most valuable franchises and pay our rent.  To the knowledgeable and courteous faculty and instructors of the AI.  To their talented and ambitious students who put up with our tormenting critiques and back breaking work schedules.  And to our friends and colleagues in the industry who support us and listen to us yap yap yap after a few post work beers.  We love you all.