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Mike Best is a CG industry veteran who has provided technical art and animation for both games and television for over 15 years. He is currently based in Vancouver, Canada where he is the Lead Technical Artist at Smoking Gun Interactive. His last completed project was at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, where he worked EyePet, a critically acclaimed augmented reality game for the PS3. The game was recently released in Europe and is due for release in early 2010 in North America. Mike designed and implemented a cutting edge facial animation pipeline, which help bring an outstanding level of facial animation fidelity to the game. Since studying film and video production at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, he has been fascinated by the process of bringing animated characters to life and has a deep interest in facial animation in particular. Mike enjoys finding innovative ways to 'push the boat out' with computer-generated creature animation.
His early professional experience in computer graphics was gained while teaching animation at the Center for Digital Imaging and Sound in Vancouver. The four years he spent there gave him a great grounding in how to analyze and distill information in a clear and concise way. This has served him well over the years, when designing pipelines and providing support to teams of artists and animators. It was also a great foundation for technical problem-solving, which he has brought to many subsequent roles.
In 2002, Mike decided that he wanted the experience of living in Europe, and moved from Vancouver to London, UK. The experience was fantastic, and he feels it really broadened his creative horizons as well as exposing him to a variety of top games and post-production companies.
Over the last 12 years he has worked on a number of triple-A games titles as well as commercial and television projects. His roles in the industry have been varied. As an Art Director at Firefly Studios h was responsible for the graphical look and feel of games that included Stronghold and Space Colony. While freelancing he did both animation and modeling work for commercials. During his time at Electronic Arts and Sony he shifted more to the technical art and animation side of production, with a strong emphasis on creature and facial technology development. As Mike and his family decided they wanted to enjoy the great quality of life on the west coast, and to be closer to home and family, they relocated to Vancouver, Canada in August 2009.
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