For anyone in the games industry, this past week is a big highlight in the calendar. All the big publishers and small indies bring their best games to showcase to the world at the annual E3 conference in LA.

This year, the game I have been working on for the past while was finally announced, namely Hitman. It is the next game in the series following on from Hitman: Absolution. There were two trailers released at E3, the announcement trailer and the gameplay trailer. I worked on some shots for the gameplay trailer which you can see below: 

With everyone putting on their very best showcases there was a great many promising games shown. The crafting system of Fallout 4 looked really impressive and no game came close to Just Cause 3 for pure fun and ridiculousness. Once again Naughty Dog did some amazing work on their Uncharted demo and Battlefront had everyone's inner fan boy very excited about the prospect of playing inside the world of the original Star Wars trilogy. A surprise appearance the The Last Guardian was great to see too with some amazing character animation and a real sense of magical wonder evident in the gameplay demo. 
Considering all the amazing games shown I'm still only looking forward to one game, for the second year in a row, that truly seems to promise the player the world, and a universe too. That is none other than No Man's Sky:

No E3 would be complete without the amazing cinematic trailers that lead the marketing efforts. My favorites this year are from Blur Studios( who always impress with their work at E3) with the Fallen Empire and Dishonored 2 trailers and Ubisoft with their impressive introduction to the Assassins Creed world set in London:

This is a really cool blog that collects all the best and coolest animation videos from around the internet:

Here are some very talented students final films from the Animation Workshop in Denmark:

Here is a site dedicated to showcasing the best animation reels on the net. There is some really inspiring work in here so it's a great source of inspiration.

Animation like this makes me so happy to be part of this wonderful animation industry. It's amazing how 3 minutes of beautiful animation can change your mood so easily.

If you haven't seen these yet then take that burger out of your mouth now and let the awesome of these two shorts blow you away!

I stumbled across this great bit of animation over on my good friends blog, Onehugeeye.com.

Check it out, you won't be dissappointed:

It's that time again. E3 time. Time for the booth babes, convention centres, announcments, new hardware and new game announcements. But I'm not interested in any of that, I just want to see the amazing cinematics for the upcoming games. Here are the best I've found so far.

I have started a collaboration project with some animators I work with. The whole idea is to build a story from all the random doodles that most artists and animators do at thier desks during a working day. When I started it I didn't expect it to get more that 10 drawings in before people lost interest but its exceeded my expectations with more that 25 drawings to date and still going strong. Check it out at: http://pandacatmarmotcat.blogspot.co.uk/ 

This is a great game with interesting characters and a engrossing storyline. The only thing I can think to make it better is some high quality cinematic action like the trailer below:

This trailer is just awesome! It's stuff like this that made me want to become an animator. As a special bonus a friend of mine was heavily involved in this which makes it even more impressive. Enjoy! 

Valve = genius. Enough said. 

More inpiration. 

Inspiration of the most genius kind.