Characters Live Eye-to-Eye

Darrin Hughes (dba i2i Creative) has been producing world-class character animation for 35 years – drawn cel, live puppeteering, game content and theme park animatronics – transforming inanimate elements into the illusion of life for high-profile projects around the world.

I've also pioneered animation systems – tools, pipelines and processes, helping to make today’s leading edge entertainment possible. I am now focused on collaborating with other innovators to facilitate the next great age of animation – advances likely to reach beyond entertainment.

Animatronics & Attraction Design


I have been in an animatronics program leadership position for both of the premiere theme park industry design teams and been involved with well over a thousand animated figures and interactive venues, contributing to many of the best dimensional animation experiences produced over the last few decades.

Foundations in Character Animation

i2i Creative is grounded in the fundamentals of character animation and theatrical presentation. Understanding how motion forms character and how characters drive storytelling is at the core of everything I do.

Whether putting pencil to paper for project ideation, designing cutting-edge animatronics or developing high-efficiency editing systems for a CG pipeline, The tenets of creating the illusion of life is in my DNA.

Foundations in Animatronics

I've learned from and provided leadership for the company that invented the art form of animatronics for a decade and a half, contributing to nearly every animatronic project from the late 80's (including MGM Studios and Disneyland Paris) through installation of California Adventure and Tokyo Disney Sea, building a master-level understanding of the art form which I've continued to evolve through professional practice over the last 20 years as design and production methods have advanced.

Building Teams

I've been recruiting, training and mentoring in-house animation teams and contracting external artists and engineers for 25 years - finding the right talent and guiding them to engage effectively with the inherently convoluted animatronic design process is a critical part of any program.

Gifted Animators and Technical Designers need to work in lockstep with mechanical & control engineers, figure finishing specialists, sculptors, set designers, project managers and a myriad of other specialists to establish an appropriate design target and see it through to installation and opening.

(caricatures by Jaemin Choi)

Pipeline Development

i2i Creative has a long track record in digital development and tool design, including pioneering pre-vis system integration in figure development, interactive playtesting and integration of live recording and keyframe editing workflows.

We've designed systems that have benefitted the best in the business for decades and continue to shape how animatronics are produced.

Concept Development

Establishing the right design target is an ultra-critical part of the process - selecting staging and a performance that tells the story with engagement and excitement and is capable of being engineered and farbricated. Shooting too high, too low, too fast or too slow can kill an attraction (and a budget).

i2i Creative is the best in the business at navigating the tightrope of Blue-sky and Concept development and generating a solid Schematic package for Design & Production.

R&D Leadership

Many of the best advances in animatronics design come from combining new technology with old-school know-how in inventive ways and by leveraging individual inspiration with team collaboration.

I've spearheaded and/or contributed to dozens of innovations, including a gaggle of patents - some anticipating future potentials and others solving specific project challenges.

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An Art Form for the Courageous

The more you understand about this medium, the more daunting it becomes. i2i Creative has focused on developing animatronics specifically because it is so very hard to do well - I thrive on the challenge.

I love it because it does something no other animation form can - it comes to life in the real world right before our eyes. That's a special kind of magic - and well worth the challenge of bringing characters and Guests eye-to-eye.

Game Animation

Gaming is the Future of Entertainment


Theme parks are awesome, and I'm a huge movie buff, but games are the medium for the 21st century. It's been said many times - games are to this century what film was to the last. Although it's come a long way, I believe the art form of game development is still in its formative stages - wildly popular but grappling with technology and creative boundaries, not yet freed from its chains.

i2i Creative has a few thoughts about breaking some of those chains...

Transition-Strategy Performance Bottleneck

In-game player-responsive character performance quality is notably constrained due to natural limits of interpolated motion-blending and the exponential scaling of cost and complexity when attempting to increase responsiveness.

This limits how long characters can hold the game-stage from the players' perspective, and tends to convert characters from engaging actors into being less-engaging abstract avatars early in the experience. Countering with pre-programmed in-game exposition or pre-rendered cut scenes can create uneven performance quality and impact player engagement.

Fundamentally, we simply have too blunt an instrument in how animation data represents motion - and its meaning.

i2i Creative is developing a method for embedding meaningful performance information into the character data set itself, and merge aspects of keyframe animation with procedural animation, resulting in greater performance quality and decreased labor costs as performance complexity increases. The intention is to allow artists to do better work with available resources and give the game engine a means to make more sophisticated decisions, and relieve some budget pressure in the process. Hopefully this will also open up new ways to approach game animation, gameplay and storytelling.

Enhanced Real-time Editing

Combining motion-capture and keyframe motion generation continues to be a challenge to many game pipelines. Creative decision-making tends to get amortized over multiple artists and processes. Labor savings in the initial performance capture can get erased in cleanup to maintain performance quality. It can be a messy pipeline on multiple levels.

Our work in the theme park industry has included developing real-time character content creation tools and methods that can help bridge the divide, giving animators more effective ways of editing mocap data, generating organic motion locally and more efficiently working with keyframe motion.

i2i Creative is eager to help create a more effective creative workflow in game animation development.

Character Performance Strategy

i2i Creative has spent quite a few years in the game development world. Designing animation for theme parks has quite a bit in common with character performance strategy design for games. Competing aesthetic expectations and technical constraints are very similar. Like animatronics, it takes a combination of character animation chops and design haiku abilities to bring characters to life.

From character design to control strategy, content creation pipeline to performance direction, i2i Creative can provide the guidance and hands-on support to get your characters to 'pop' in all the best ways.


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Engaging Character Animation

i2i Creative leverages talent, tools and resources to deliver engaging game characters.

We can help you build a revolutionary pipeline, add value to the one you're using, or just help produce great character performances.

Check us out.

Advanced Robotics & R&D

Taking Automated Behavior to the Next Level


Amazing things are happening in the field of mobile robotics and research for a wide range of human-interface applications. Engaging human and animal motion has been produced in ever more intriguing and convincing forms, but there is still an important nut to crack - getting that natural behavior to integrate fully and effectively in a path from the aesthetically-trained artists that train to generate performance motion and the mobility control arena. To date those two worlds have had to be kept functionally separate for real-world applications when it comes to either interfacing with or simulating human motion - particularly with high-level cognitive actions related to human communication.

I believe that integrating performance and mobility control for real-world applications is really just a paradigm shift away - and some diligent sleeves-rolled-up effort. And I believe that character animation and my background in deconstructing movement for live performance control has a valuable part to play in that development.

The leap to behavioral automation control may have many applications, not least of which may be to pave the way for more effective ways for robotics to directly engage with humans, particularly those with special needs or in situations where constant attention is required but is difficult to provide.

It could also revolutionize animation for entertainment as well, and is tied in with i2i Creative's objectives for contributions to the game and theme park industries. But the possibility of improving lives more directly is very exciting.


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Behavioral Response Development

i2i Creative is working to make robotics more behaviorally robust - not only in terms of visual performance, but also through parametric performance scripting to fully integrate with mobility processing.

Let's talk.