Gears 5 - Cinematic Lighting

I had the oppurtunity to work on the in-game cutscenes for Gears 5 at Axis Studios. We were working as outsource partners with The Coalition, who were a really great group of people to work with, along with our internal team at Axis, who really put in everything they could to make these cinematics shine. I was the lighting lead of our team at Axis, working with Scott Yorke and Dan McCance to light several cinematics for the game. The cinematics ran in real-time at 30fps, so we had to work efficiently with the amount of lights and post process effects we could use, to run on X-Box One hardware. Along with lighting, we were also performance testing and optimising our scenes, which I learned a lot from. All of the cinematics shown here are ones I've fully lit for the entire sequence, from first pass to final, with the exeption of the Mind Device scene, which I only did the first establishing pass. For this project, I lit in total around 13min of footage.

Missile Silo Cinematic

Missile Silo Cinematic. Using the closing door as a lighting motivator here was fun.

Missile Silo Cinematic. Setting up the spinning environment lights helped create a sense of urgency in this scene.

Missile Silo Cinematic

Facility End Cinematic. I got to push colour a little more at the start of this cutscene.

Facility End Cinematic

Meet Fahz Cinematic. This cinematic was fun, I got to take a pass on the level lighting for this area to assist the cinematic lighting.

Meet Fahz Cinematic

Meet Fahz Cinematic. I really enjoyed getting to work with some higher contrast in the lighting here.

Baggage Cinematic

Clayton Rescue Cinematic

Arrive Riftworm Village Cinematic

Mind Device Cinematic (Dream Sequence)

Mind Device Cinematic (Dream Sequence). This was another case where I got to take a pass at lighting the environment to support the cinematic, and develop the look based on a concept from the Director.

Mind Device Cinematic (Dream Sequence)

Mind Device Cinematic (Dream Sequence). This scene was really fun, as it's quite different in style to the rest of the game.

Hammer Launches Cinematic.

Hammer Launches Cinematic. This was another case where I got to push colours a little more to suit the scene.

Hammer Launches Cinematic