Toys for Bob’s highly anticipated remake Spyro Reignited Trilogy marks the 20th anniversary of the much loved video games released in the late 1990s. Remastered from the ground-up, it includes shiny new versions of the three original games: Spyro the Dragon, Spyro2: Ripto’s Rage!, and Spyro: Year of the Dragon. From rescuing dragons to exploring Forgotten Worlds, the scaled-up adventure – with state-of-the-art graphical improvements in stunning HD – gives fans a completely reimagined, modern gaming experience.
Technicolor Animation & Games was involved in the project early on, traveling to San Francisco for the kick-off at the Activision studio. There they worked closely with the Toys for Bob creative team – including Cinematics Director Andy Salvo and Senior Producer Nick Livingston – to gain a full understanding of the of the project and sync up on the storyline and cinematic content. While on-site, initial hand keyed animation was integrated into the game with lighting, as a test.
Once work got underway, the full scope included 20 animators recreating all cinematic content – from story build and layout to stylized animation – and 12 animators working on in-game animation. This enabled the team to work on the same characters for cinematics as well as for in-game loops. Explaining the creative partnership to reignite the original Spyro trilogy, Animation Lead Guru Kochukrishnan noted:
“We were in frequent and regular communication with Andy the director – himself an animator who could immediately understand the situation at hand – and we also established an easy rapport with all of our counterparts on the Toys for Bob team. As game animators and artists used to dealing with varying degrees of stylized key frame, realistic, hyper realistic, and motion captured data, we also had the opportunity here to really have fun with key framed performance, taking it right through the QC and integration process with the game’s designers.”
In addition to Animation Lead Guru Kochukrishnan, the Technicolor Animation & Games team was led by Producer Prithi Amarnath; Head of Production Kumar Chandrasekaran; and Animation Supervisor Selvam Venkatesan.
