The highly anticipated fourth instalment of the Age of Empires franchise took a refreshing approach where historical accuracy of the gameplay was front and centre. With that came a unique approach to the cutscenes - a serialised historical film in the style of a BBC documentary played out as you completed the stages in a campaign, featuring live-action footage of modern locations overlaid with stylised animation of historical events.

I worked across the one-hundred+ shots that Compost produced, leading the design of a number stylised character-led shots, primarily involving environment modelling, cloth simulation and processing of motion capture data in addition to developing the non-photoreal shading pipeline. I also supervised the design of a further twenty+ shots for one of four gaming campaigns, and was responsible for the character textures & shaders across two campaigns (forty+ shots). Also led the design and production of the photoreal title sequences for the campaigns, featuring close-up animated books.