Carlos Mendieta

Carlos Mendieta is an American video game character animator and artist. He worked at Retro Studios from 2003 to 2016 as a designer for Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, and their unannounced Wii U game, which is presumed cancelled.
Mendieta was interviewed by the Kiwi Talkz podcast about his work on Echoes and Corruption in 2022.
==Early career==
Mendieta began his career as a Character Animator at Aston Entertainment for eight months. After, he moved to Chicago to work as an animator at High Voltage Software, before joining Retro Studios in 2003.
==Metroid Prime series==
Mendieta had been a fan of the original Metroid and Metroid Prime. He was brought over to Retro Studios by Stephen Zafros. As an animator, Mendieta would work with Bryan Walker and the engineers, adjusting animations as they played the game together. Near the end of development on Echoes, cutscenes were animated once the room placements were finalized. Mendieta described cutscenes featuring multiple characters in Corruption were very complex to animate, with one featuring the four Bounty Hunters having to be split among three animators. The animators would be assigned a cutscene and were given two weeks to finish it - the first week was spent animating, and the second scripting and playtesting them to match the in-game events. While he had some input on what would take place in cutscenes, much of the time he would receive a storyboard from Nintendo SPD or Sammy Hall and animate a scene based on it.Kiwi Talkz. "#125 - Carlos Mendieta Interview (Metroid Prime, Donkey Kong, Animation, Drawing, Comics etc.)". YouTube. February 19, 2022. Retrieved August 23, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N287bJVTyJU
He animated the Space Pirates in Echoes. For Corruption, Mendieta animated the cutscenes where the Defense Cannon is fired into space and directed at the Leviathan before it hits Norion, the Galactic Federation's arrival at Phaaze and conflict with the Space Pirates, and the first ending scene where Samus Aran gives a thumbs-up to the player and Admiral Dane salutes her. He also animated the teaser trailer that unveiled the game at E3 2005.https://www.carlosmendieta.com/demo-reel.html
==Subsequent career==
Having fallen in love with the city of New Orleans, Mendieta left Retro Studios in 2016 in order to move there. After his departure, Mendieta worked at InXile Entertainment, where he animated The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep and Wasteland 3. He left InXile in 2021 and did contract work for Nickelodeon, WayForward Technologies and Dimensional Ink Games before being hired at 2K in early 2022. Additionally, Mendieta is a contract Character Animator at Discord, and created a comic, Counter Culture, which he funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign.
At the time of his Kiwi Talkz interview (February 2022), Mendieta had not played Metroid Dread due to not having a Nintendo Switch, but enjoyed what he saw of the game's animation, particularly the E.M.M.I.
==External links==
*Website
*Mendieta on LinkedIn
*Old LinkedIn profile
*Mendieta on MobyGames
*Mendieta on Instagram
*Interview with Kiwi Talkz
*Kickstarter campaign for Counter Culture #1
==References==
Category:Retro Studios employees
Category:Animators