22. Alexandre Belbari, Lead Animator, can’t wait for you to see how our top-notch, cinematic-quality crypto game will revolutionize everything

The week leading up to the release of our Illuvium cinematic trailer was a tremendous time crunch. With 168 hours left till deadline, the core contributors were streamlining workflows to nail their high standard without having to slow down. Their effective reactiveness to the challenges that arose, and ability to quickly problem solve, can be credited to their collective years of professional experience. Alexandre Belbari, Lead Animator, cited length of experience as the most important edge that a pro in animation could have.

“One must be crazy or passionate to put in the hours required to get to a decent professional level,” he explains. “I am talking years and years of full commitment. Those thousands of hours that an animator spends animating and researching is often getting in the way of other normal social activities but hey, that’s the price of doing what you love.” And because of that commitment, the Illuvium core was able to accomplish a huge feat of artistry in a short amount of time, that could have taken other teams additional delays.

After graduating from ESMA, in the south of France, in 2010, Alex began working with Marvel on projects like X-Men. The following four years, Alex was able to work with and learn from key animators in the industry. Alex moved to ILM Lucasfilm where he worked on notable projects including Transformers, Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxies, Godzilla and Ready Player One. With this considerable experience under his belt, he started to freelance as a Senior Animator.

After ten years in the film industry, Alex’s credits continue to appear across many studios, including MPC, Method, theMill, and Pixomonodo on various projects including: Men in Black, IT 2, League of Legends and more recently, The Mandalorian, the hit Star Wars television franchise. Through Illuvium, Alex enters the gaming genre as a Lead Animator, infusing the project with the passion, knowledge and skills that he refined through years of film industry experience.

The Lead Animator’s task is to identify the animation style. “Illuvium has a lot of Illuvials, and they are all kind of crazy creatures, that you won’t find on planet earth. The challenges as an animator is that you may not find real video references and so you need to be creative and decide how its going to move. There is an insane amount of animations to create, so another great challenge is to keep the same style for each Illuvial.”

An animator will often put extra hours if given what’s called a “hero” shot, meaning a shot that can show a lot of character detail. Alex animates his best pieces when he is excited about the shot, especially a hero shot. “Give me a great and challenging shot,” Alex says, “enough time to animate, some good songs, and this is the perfect cocktail of a flow state.”

Speaking of flow states, Alex knows that the key to unlocking his creativity has to do with being in nature, and the power of simple things every day: “I live by the beach. My daily routine starts early, around 6.30 am, feeding my angry and hungry chickens. I have silkies in my garden. Then I check the surf report. If we have waves, I have a session for an hour. Then breakfast and Boom! More ready to work after that.”

A very important part of Alex’s work is to stay creative, however, creativity is not unlimited energy. It needs to be recharged from time to time. “The solution that I found was to expand my skills to other areas outside of animation. this way if I get out of juice animating, I can for instance spend a few weeks doing rigging, because it does not require so much Art juice, Then I can also spend some time drawing and painting for some other projects etc. This time off from animation will basically allow myself to reset and see everything from a new angle.”

In addition, the Lead Animator also builds the animation team, and maintain cohesion on the unified vision. “For general matters, I work very closely with the Art Director and Game Designer,” Alex says. “On the technical side, I work very closely with the animators as well as the rigging department. I assign tasks to the animators. and make sure to push, and raise, the level of what we execute.”

Alex enjoys that in Illuvium, he can show greater leadership and creative freedom, as well as work closely with a team where everyone can make significant contributions to the project. “With Illuvium, the scale of the team is much smaller, at 40–50 people. With the 4 current animators, their work will have a greater impact. We also get to be closer as a whole team.”

“One of the team goals of this game is to bring cinematic-level animations in-game. We want to show that even with a small team, we can achieve what studio will achieve with a much bigger team,” Alex says. “I think that the crypto gamers will be happy to see Illuvium proposing high-end visual art and animations, combined with addictive game play. If we manage to push things the way we envision, and we will, then other artists in the industry will be very impressed with what a full remote team can do in a few months. It might also give a signal to bigger studios that crypto gaming is indeed coming and nothing can stop it. I won’t be surprised to see the biggest studios releasing nft games in the near future.”

Even as interest in NFTs starts to explode worldwide, Illuvium still leads the way in its artistry. “The road map of Illuvium is huge. Eventually, we will be working on expansion sets with more content, zones and Illuvials, directly after the game release. In the crypto gaming scene, Illuvium will set the bar very high, in terms of visuals, animations, and 3D art. In my opinion, there is currently a missing piece in the crypto game industry and Illuvium will be the AAA first title to revolutionize in the way we fix this gap. Everyone is going to love it.”

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