Here’s the second half of my interview with Lost Planet Cutscene Director, Mr. Yoshiyuki Tonoe.

[Brian] Can you go over the process of how a script gets turned into a full-fledged cutscene?

[Tonoe] Sure. Of course our work doesn’t start until the story is finalized. Then we take the story and draw up storyboards, and take care of whatever motion-capturing we need to do. Next we get the 3D assets, the character models and other props and environments, from the artists in charge of those things, and fuse that with the captured mo-cap data to start putting scenes together. Finally, we show it to the person in charge of story and continuity, Hosokawa-san the designer in this case, and get his OK, or refine it if needed. Once we get the OK, we show it to Takeuchi-san, the producer for final approval.

Click to read the conclusion to the interview.

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I’m blogging from my parents’ place in Seattle. We drove up for the holidays and almost had a White Christmas—it started snowing here on Wednesday night, missing the big day by 2 days.

This week’s interview is a little later than usual, with the holidays, coordinating with Japan and all that. But better late than never.

For this week’s interview, I asked Tonoe-san, the Cutscene Director for Lost Planet, all about the cutscenes in Lost Planet and the work that went into making them. Lost Planet Director Kenji Oguro also added some comments here and there.

Click to read Part 1 of the interview.

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Hi All You Capcom Fanatics,

If you will be in the San Francisco Bay Area the night of January 11, you’ve got party plans, my friend. We are pleased as punch to announce the release of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for the Xbox 360 on Friday 1/12/07 by partying away the night before!

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Just a heads up about our upcoming Lost Planet launch party next month. If you are going to be in or near San Francisco on January 11, you are welcome to come join us celebrate the launch of Lost Planet with a party, a Lost Planet tournament, a chance to meet the developers of the game, and much much more.

Just head over to our Lost Planet community site for details.

—Brian