EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH GERI BERTOLO

BEHIND THE ACTION FIGURES
By Santiago Mendez

This is one of the men responsible for doing the animation for the characters in the game, including Boston Low, which we play with. After leaving LucasArts he worked on Disney's Gargoyles as a character designer. More recently he was an animation director for Jojo's Circus also for Disney. I shared some words with this cool Canadian about his work, animation and of course The Dig.


Tell us a bit about yourself and how did you get in the animation business.

When I was young, I saw the anime series called Gatchaman and Yamato. They made me want to animate. Star Wars began my fascination of drawing and thinking through my pencil to create characters and other worlds. I enrolled at Sheridan College for animation, and LucasArts reviewed our portfolios in my graduating year.

What is your favorite animation studio?

Thats a tough one! How about I tell you my personal favourites? Aeon Flux, Cyber Six, Thundercats, Transformers, Akira ETC! There's TOO MANY!!
TMS has been my favourite studio out of Japan since the 80's series 'Bionic Six' for TV series though. I'd LOVE to work with them someday....

Is there any difference beetwen the way the animation work was done in LucasArts with animation for TV?

Well, with LucasArts, all of the animation was done by us in-house. Usually, with TV animation, the actual animation is done off-site. Its shipped overseas and done there, usually in Japan or Korea, somewhere overseas.

Did you animate the movies in the game (cutscenes) or the interactive characters (sprays)?

I did a bit of both. First, I did the character designs for Low, Maggie and Brink based on earlier designs done on an earlier Brian Moriarty version of The Dig years before. There were two sets of designs, one for close-ups and the other for far/medium shots. Because of the low resolution at the time, the close up shots were detailed, but in the far/medium shots, the characters didn't have finger or facial detail.
Then I did about half of the storyboarded sequences for the cut scenes. After that I did some animation on all of the walk cycles, but they were tweaked on many occasions after that.
I also did the lighting effects on the tram scenes, and the watch dog pixel animation, where the one watchdog attacks the other and the huge boulder falls on them.

Do you remeber which of the cutscenes where done by you?

I remember doing the scenes where Maggie is trying to pull out the stick in the gummed-up grate to release the water to wash away the ID 'spider' creature. We had to animate the shadows on a second pass as well.

Did you have to respect a certain style? what instructions did you had for your work?

Sean Clark was our game head and he was into a realistic style. Bill Tiller had done these really beautiful backgrounds and came up with the look with LucasArts' head designer Peter Chan. Peter designed all the aliens.

Any anecdotes of The Dig?

We had a lot of fun on that game, and at one point I made 12 inch action figures of Maggie, Brink and Low. It was also the game that a lot of us Canadians got hired on for.

Action Figures? How did you made them?

I made them out of GI Joes and a Barbie respectively. If I ever find them, I can send a pic.

Have you participated in the "Pizza Orgy"?

Yep! I believe that was the wrap party? Lots of food and fun!

Have you played the game? What do you think of it?

I played the game, and even though I worked on it, I still found it to be HARD! Yikes! It was great to see it completed!

For more about Geri's work you can go to:
http://www.mercenaries-the-series.com

February 3, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Santiago Méndez.

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