One of the coolest projects I worked on last year was Sony’s DC Universe Online game. It’s a massive online roleplaying game where you can play as and interact with various DC Comics characters, as well as new characters created for the game. One feature of DC Universe Online is animated cutscenes, shown when you defeat certain characters or complete specific levels of the game. I had the opportunity to work on some of these scenes as a colorist, and now that the game has been released I can share some of the work I did.

The first scene I worked on featured the Joker:

Click for full-size

The main difference from this coloring job and regular comic book work was that in these cutscenes the art is separated into layers for the animators.

Coloring each element of the illustration separately made it tougher to unify the entire image with lighting and color palette, but overall I’m very happy with the way most of the images turned out.

Some more shots from the Joker scene:

Click to embiggen

Batman and the Joker.

To make big, you must click!

Background for the above shot.

Surely you know how this works by now.

Last shot from the scene.

Here’s the final animated cutscene, narrated by the awesome Mark Hamill:

I grew up watching the Batman animated series which featured Mark Hamill as the Joker, so it’s pretty amazing to hear that voice narrating something I had a hand in making. It’s times like this I realize how awesome my job is.

I love Batman so much, you guys.

Slow down, Bats! You'll get to the Willamette Valley soon enough.

Enough that, when I had a chance to go to bed before midnight last night, I stayed up an extra 90 minutes to create this, just because I love Batman so much.

Enjoy!