Cutscene Artist

at Square Enix

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I am first and foremost, a storyteller. I have always been most fascinated by the various ways you can reel in and captivate your audience, be it through the eloquence of your very words, the charm of the characters you portray or the visual techniques you use to convey them. Nothing brings me more joy than exploring new ground in visual and interactive storytelling and it is this passion that led me first to art, then theatre and from there to game development and interactive cinema, giving me the perfect combination of skills for game cinematics.

Growing up attending art school for ten years as recreational education ignited my love of telling stories visually, which first got me into drawing comics and then to being bolder by letting my stories leave the confines of the page through acting and theatre. It was this newly found love of theatre that inspired me to work hard in order to be accepted into the esteemed Kallio Upper Secondary School of Performing Arts in Finland, where my overall focus became theatre acting, speech communication, philosophy, ethics and psychology with a touch of dance and creative writing on the side. My final project for theatre acting was a deep dive into the world of mask acting through Commedia dell’arte and as our play proved wildly successful, we established a Commedia dell’arte troupe with some of the other cast members and took on various gigs, even for the annual Night of the Arts held in Helsinki in 2007.

While at first I was keen to pursue my love of theatre even further, I couldn’t resist the pull of another long time passion – video games – when the opportunity to study Computer Games and Multimedia Development at the University of Worcester in the United Kingdom presented itself. There I learned the basics of a wide array of skills needed for game development such as level design, 3D modelling, object-oriented programming and scripting while also broadening my understanding of computing as a whole. I combined my love of game design and psychology to offer a model for debunking the myth that playing video games breeds violence with my dissertation “Violence in Games: A Model from a Game Design Perspective” which led me to receiving Northams Prize for the Best Independent Study and graduating with 1st Class Honours.

While delving into the more technical aspects of making games helped me establish a good understanding of what goes into game development as a whole, I felt my strengths and passion lay more on the narrative side of things so my journey to refocus on visual storytelling took me to Keio University Graduate School of Media Design in Japan, where after grasping the fundamentals of media design, technology, management and policy I specialized in interactive visual storytelling through cinematic production, art direction and high quality video fundamentals and created a new approach to interactive cinema for my thesis Surreal Interactive Movie System S.I.M.S : enhancing viewer immersion with natural action and behavior -based interactions in real space environments.

After gathering such a robust toolset from all my experiences so far, I kickstarted my career at Remedy Entertainment as a cinematic designer starting with their game/tv-show hybrid, Quantum Break, which gave me a taste of Hollywood style cinematography and intricate time travel story logic, then moving onto CrossFireX: Operation Catalyst, which pushed me to think differently and try new methods to best convey a story in the first person perspective, and finally Control which presented the challenge of how to retain a high quality cinematic style through mostly procedural means.

As all I had been making so far were shooters, I next wanted to try my hand in another genre that typically put more emphasis on the narrative – role-playing games. This shift took me to conquer new challenges at Luminous Productions first in the world of Final Fantasy 15 and the tech demo Back Stage as a Cinematic Artist and from there as the Cinematic Lead on Forspoken responsible for everything related to performance capture and English voice recording, to then having full ownership of everything related to cinematics in its DLC In Tanta We Trust. Getting the opportunity to experience both Western game development workflows and Japanese ones has broadened my thinking tremendously, and being neck deep in narrative not only in English but also in Japanese has allowed me to become intimately aware of localization intricacies and cultural nuances, which has greatly enhanced my storytelling expertise and know-how.

From there, the next step in my career took me to Square Enix to work on the remake of one of the most beloved titles of all time – Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which gave me the chance to work on series staples like summons, along with special attack and minigame cameras, in addition to the usual cinematic work. My speciality lies in story-driven emotional character moments, so it was refreshing to try my hand on more action-oriented and cuteness infused camera work required for the quirks of this title.

As can be seen from my experiences so far I do not shy away from challenges, but instead embrace them. Even though I’ve made many dreams a reality already, my journey isn’t over yet and I am always up for new interesting ventures that encourage me to expand my potential and skills beyond my current comfort zone and ultimately make me a better teller of stories. Learning is a never-ending process and I can’t wait for what new adventures the future has in store for me.

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Previous: Luminous Productions, Remedy Entertainment

Skills: Motion Builder, Maya, Premiere, Sony Vegas Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Unreal Engine 4, Luminous Engine, Northlight Engine, Construct 2, ActionScript, Unreal Script, C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, Lingo, Ruby, SQL, Photoshop, Procreate, 3D Studio Max, Unreal Editor, Flash, Visual Studio, Perforce, SVN, Confluence, Slack, Microsoft Office

Favorite games: Persona 2 & 3, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon Age series, Planet Laika, Corpse Party, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy VI, X & XI, Clock Tower series, Folklore, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Until Dawn, Fatal Frame, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, Jazz Jackrabbit