What People Say
I've worked with Nick for many years on several projects. He is a rare talent who combines strong aesthetic and artistic direction with deep technical industry knowledge. His technical background has served him well in his work in Cinematics, as he has been able to solve difficult problems including the assembly of dynamic cinematic scenes in Watch Dogs Legion. During the pandemic, we would not have been able to ship without Nick's innovative problem solving skills, when he figured out how to adapt our cinematics pipeline to support remote work. As a director he has proven himself repeatedly, overseeing high quality scenes featuring well realized characters and emotional impact. His work is strong, consistent, and high quality and I can't recommend Nick enough.
When I enjoyed my creative tenor at Ubisoft Toronto I had the pleasure to cross collaborative paths with Nick on a few productions including Assassins Creed Unity and Watch Dogs: LEGION. With Nick you get a healthy balance between applied technical creative know how wrapped with an artistic eye for cinematography.
My personal experience with Nick on our game production cinematics and in game cut scenes where experiences that felt like genuine partnerships. I was able to provide ideas and emotional targets and Nick would come with a command for leveraging our engine tech and tools to find solutions and the answers. He is also very organized about process and focus areas at each phase that would leave room for iteration and enough flexibility for stakeholder inputs. As Art Director, Nick made me feel welcome in the process. Always supportive, always willing to sync up and always willing to clarify feedbacks at key check-in points.
On Watch Dogs: LEGION Nick pushed for innovation and we got some incredible memorable moments for our Bloodlines DLC production work. Nick operates with a rare quality that balances developing scenes to compelling quality with his team and driven by a passion for finding ways to always improve the process. Nick's VR camera capture tech comes to mind as a stand out breakthrough in this regard.
Nick's proficiency with the craft makes him fearless with any challenge. He's fast and effective with pre-vis steps to ensure ideas are on the track... and he is a fantastic communicator who will pull the right strings together to form scenes he's responsible for.
I had the pleasure of working alongside Nick and found him to be a tremendous asset to our team. Nick was instrumental in helping me adapt to the gaming industry. He has an incredible wealth of knowledge with various game engines and technologies.
Nick always pushes the boundaries and encourages innovation, which has resulted in creating some amazing cinematics. I had the privilege of co-creating a handful of tools with Nick, and his input and suggestions made the tools better than I could have ever imagined.
His contributions to our team were invaluable and his work speaks for itself. Nick will be an invaluable asset to any team that is lucky enough to have him onboard.
I've had the pleasure of working with Nicholas for many years while we both worked at Ubisoft Toronto. He is a hard worker to say the least, extremely dedicated to quality and has a passion for emerging tech and techniques. Nicholas' knowledge about game engines, player experience and overall strategies on improving just about anything is vast. He is a very valuable asset to any team/project if they are seeking to make drastic improvements.
My time working with Nick was an extremely rewarding and learning packed experience. He has the rare ability to jump between deep technical aspects and yet balance his brain somehow to also consider the purely creative aspects of game development. A strong practical cinematic eye paired with technical knowledge make Nick a great addition to any team where the 2 are intertwined
Nick is able to see past the siloed nature of game development with practical understanding of all departments that touch his own, making him an ideal leader on the mocap floor. His agnostic attitude to where solutions may come from, means he can draw solutions from an actor, animator or a mocap supervisor, whilst maintaining a clear vision the repercussions of choices through the pipeline. Where every second is a chance to tell a story and costs an arm and a leg, Nick delivers quality performances - even at the cutting edge of what's possible.
I worked with Nick in a collaborative context at United Front Games and found him to have a real knack for presentation and design. Just as importantly he had a strong understanding of the overall work-flow, technology,and pipeline of our game engine. He was fearless when it came to diving right in and understanding the system from a technical context... to the point that he was able to read and understand source code as well as the broad-scale implications of work-flow decisions. In short, there are people who 'get it', and people who don't. Nick is definitely one of the former, and I am happy to give my recommendation.
I have had the pleasure of working with nick, directly and indirectly, for almost 10 years now. Nick is a great individual to have on your team and in a company.
Nick throws himself at every challenge with maximum effort and is constantly striving for greatness in whatever he does. When I worked with nick on game cinematics, his work and creativity were top notch. He always took constructive criticism without flinching in pursuit of the best end result. He also helped design game cinematic tools that greatly improved the quality and and almost doubled the volume of work that could be produced. In this and all tasks he works on, Nick is not the type of person to wait to have answers given to him. Nick is adept at finding or driving solutions to problems and bottlenecks in his path.
Nick is also a multi-talented individual, and I have watched him thrive in whatever role he's taken on. He has a love for learning new things, in and outside his area, that is unmatched.
Nick also has the enviable ability to jump on a new team and just fit in immediately. Nick is respected among people in the industry as much for his great personality as he is for his constantly expanding talent. I have no hesitation in recommending Nicholas, and would be happy to answer any other questions. I can be contacted through him, anytime.