Cinematographer for game dev?

Yes, the job title is Art Director.

Good art directors tend to have hobbies and skills and often work experience in both cinema and photography.

Well, those cinematic trailers don't come from nowhere.

Well, those cinematic trailers don't come from nowhere.

Very good point.

As above, the person who directs the colour palette, the texturing style, and... the rest of the art, is the art director.

Depending on the size of the project, you may also have a bunch of specialists, such as matte painters or lighting artists. On one project I worked on, the guy who did all the camera animation, framing, focusing, etc, for our cutscenes, had previously worked as a focus puller. On another project, the main animator had been a TV stunt-man

As a side note: in many cases, those fancy cinematic trailers aren't actually made by the game developer; they're often contracted out to film VFX companies.

No idea if it's normal. But it's something I've been working out the design for awhile now. A camera system which makes use of a camera that simulates dolly on track, cranes, running man, and even some very slight jitter to simulate a steady cam.

The steady cam is one I actually took to simulating after paying very close attention to a marathon viewing of LotR trilogy. I noticed that even though the camera shots were for all intents and purposes steady, there was a very slight jitter in the viewing angle. Adding that into the view matrix to emulate it with a game camera made a world of difference. Even though the scene used was ugly programmer art, the steady cam one just felt more alive. The same kind of feeling when going from a camera that exactly follows a character to one that has a more springy follow pattern.