BioWare - Interview with Jonathan Perry, Cinematic Designer

On the Bioware blog, there's an interview with cinematic designer Jonathan Perry talks about how he got into the industry, what he does at work everyday, the proudest moments in DA2's development and much more. Here's a tidbit:

What does an average day look like for you?
As a lead I spend a lot of the day attending planning meetings and coordinating with the other departments to make sure we get the assets we need from them and vice versa. The rest of an average day might include building stages for conversations, creating cutscenes (which could be anything from an emotional romance scene to a high-action combat scene), tweaking our various digital acting systems, and sometimes attending VO recording or motion capture sessions…….
Do you have any advice for those wishing to get into the video game industry?
Make something! Make characters, textures, animations, machinima, a mod or whatever you’re interested in doing. There are lots of easily accessible game engines and toolsets out there to play with. The results might not be very good at first, but keep making things and they’ll get better. I love it when candidates have a big portfolio of work that shows they’re passionate about what they’re making and would be doing it even if they weren’t trying to get a job in the industry. And play lots of games! Be able to discuss a variety of games and what they did well or what could have been improved.

More information.

It sounds like you have a nice job, Jonathan. Honestly, I'm a little jealous. But, that said, could you possibly do a bit less of it? You know, make fewer cutscenes. Maybe then someone would fill in those gaps with an actual game…

Originally Posted by Capt. Huggy Face
It sounds like you have a nice job, Jonathan. Honestly, I'm a little jealous. But, that said, could you possibly do a bit less of it? You know, make fewer cutscenes. Maybe then someone would fill in those gaps with an actual game…

sad but true