The thing is... we didn't have any cinematic designers for TW2 dialog scenes. I know BioWare uses Cinematic Designers and it definitely is the way to go, but we only had the writers
. So after the three of us (writers) finished work on the script, we had to jump in and set up the dialog scenes.
Our dialog editor (cameras and gestures setup tool) was implemented very quickly ergo buggy as hell. We actually had a lot of rules we set for ourselves to establish how we can use the limited animations, and head movements. When we talked about the overall quality we told ourselves "We can't make ME2 quality within the limits that we have, but we must reach a point when noone will rate the game down because of the dialog scenes". I always considered that mission a success. But a kind word from a professional? I will pass them to my former teammates.
...
There were four dialog and story designers (counting Sebastian, the lead writer). But one of them was more of a dialog producer than a writer. We also had a "lead writer - english" for translation.
Essentially 3 people (Sebastian, me, and Arek) covered writing everything in cutscenes, main quests and side quests, while one more writer (with some outsource help, I think) did all the journals, shops, and communities chit-chats.
So 2 out of these three writers (me and Arek) teamed up with our dialog producer Artur and formed the little cinematic design team (joined by an animator and programmer). 9 months before the content lock we didn't even have a working dialog tool
. Boy was that a hard time.