The Portfolio of Michael Talarico
I have been in the business of making captivating and appealing images for Film, Televison, and Interactive Entertainment for more than 25 years now in a variety of capacities. They have all been highly colaborative undertakings and the teams of people involved have been both large and small but always in an environment of enthusiasm and creativity with a shared desire to make the best visuals imaginable. The work has been diverse and fascinating, we have created worlds that have ranged from the fantastic to the realistic, from deep in outerspace to deep in the Earth's oceans and many places in between. Some of these projects have been fortunate enough to have won Academy Awards, others have won Televison Emmys or Video Game awards. Some of these undertakings have been with me as an artist or technician, and others have been under my supervision, and some of them have been just me making images on my own. I like working in all of these capacites.
Welcome to my site, I hope you like what you see.
-Mike

Harry Potter Games

As the CG Supervisor for the Potter games, I was brought in to Electronic Art’s UK Studio to help the team move towards a visual direction that was more in line with the films which fans had come to associate with more and more. The previous games up to The Prisoner of Azkaban had taken a more stylistic and cartoon-like approach. Now the producers wanted to create a “realistic” world where it was more cinematic and the characters where close in appearance to the actors in the Warner Brothers feature films.  

Starting with The Goblet of Fire game we restructured the art team to work more like a film CG team would and put much greater emphasis on lighting the worlds more dramatically and giving visual effects a stronger role in the game. This meant working with the engineers to insure the budgets and code would accomodate these major changes.  This was a huge change for the team in how they worked, but yielded some striking environments that really took on a life not previously seen.  It was my responsibility to oversee the creation of all pipelines and workflows for the 30+ artists to insure the fastest and greatest ease of iteration wherever possible within the constraints of the production. 

The images below from The Order of the Phoenix show how characters have now begun to resemble the film characters by the use of actual scan data from the actors themselves, this was a significant win for the game team. The other Images from The Goblet of Fire (which came before “Phoenix”) demonstrates the significant change in how environments were made and lit to take on a much more cinematic feel. At the very bottom of the line of images you will see images from the previous games for comparison.

ORDER OF THE PHOENIX IMAGES

Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter model based upon actor’s scan data
Scan data was used in this way for all main characters
Order of the Phoenix, Hermione Granger model based upon actor’s scan data
Order of the Phoenix, Ron Weasley model based upon actor’s scan data
Hogwart’s Grand Staircase from The Order of the Phoenix
Hogwart’s Courtyard from The Order of the Phoenix
Spell casting from The Order of the Phoenix
The Ministry of Magic from The Order of the Phoenix

GOBLET OF FIRE IMAGES

Dragon from The Goblet of Fire
Gryndylow from The Goblet of Fire
Skrewt from The Goblet of Fire
Vampyre Mosp from The Goblet of Fire
Defense Against the Dark Arts Level from The Goblet of Fire
Defense Against the Dark Arts Level from The Goblet of Fire
Underwater Challenge Level from The Goblet of Fire
Underwater Challenge Level from The Goblet of Fire
Herbology Level from The Goblet of Fire
Herbology Level from The Goblet of Fire
Prefect’s Bathroom Level from The Goblet of Fire
Final Boss Battle with Voldemort from The Goblet of Fire
THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN GAME SCREENSHOTS