Tuesday, 4 November 2008

How we came to a Final Idea, which everybody agreed with

First an foremost, as group we all have one thing in common, which is a passion for violent films and computer games.  Naturally, we began to talk about creating an environment with a dark and miserable atmosphere.  Stuart, a member of our group came up with an idea of creating a dungeon scene where the main character would have to travel down a flight of dark steps to witness the terrifying horror.  I listened to the idea, and liked where he was heading with it.  I liked the dungeon idea because dungeons tend to have no windows and minimal light sources, which would give us the opportunity to play around with shadows and flickering lights to enhance the scary mood we wanted to portray.


With a dungeon idea in mind we told Josh the idea who was happy to hear that we were directing our ideas towards horror.  We decided as a group to hold a team meeting on the Friday in the year 2 animation room.  It was in this meeting that we brainstormed all our ideas on to paper.  We put down influences such as, The Decent, Theif 3, Hostel and Resident Evil.  After the brainstorming session, which took about 45 minutes, we went onto YouTube to look at some video clips of scary films and games.  This was very helpful because it aloud the group and myself to point out what we liked visually.  Once we had gotten bored of looking at horror games and film on YouTube, we photocopied the brainstorm and gave everybody a copy so that we could find some more visual research.  During the brainstorming we highlighted the influences and ideas we liked so we knew what to research.


Josh and I did some research in the LRC, looking into Gothic architecture.  I found images of stairs entrances that looked similar to the Resident Evil ones.  Josh did some drawings in his sketch book of the arch ways that he wanted to put into the mansion. We photocopied the images of gothic architecture that we wanted.  I also took out two books which I thought could help myself and the others with the making of the environment. The books are called “Digital Lighting & Rendering” by Jeremy Birn and “3D Game Textures – Create Professional Game Art using Photoshop” by Luke Ahearn.  The texturing book also came with a CD with holds royalty free texture which I may use. (hehehe).  


When I got home I started on some digital painting for the concept of the corridor which was inspired by Hostel.


The next time we met up as a group Josh and I brought in some books to help up visualise what we wanted our environment to be.  Josh brought in a Resident Evil game guidebook, which had screenshots of the game play.  I brought in two books on Art Nouvea architecture and furniture and screenshots of the Hostel film, Condemned 2 and Soul Reaver.  From the research we had brought in we decided to created the interior of the Resident Evil mansion entrance.  The reason for the Resident Evil entrance is that it looked haunting and spooky without being too obvious.  Secondly, we chose to include a dark corridor inspired by the game Max Payne , where the audience would hear sounds of crying babies and things of that nature that would scare the audience psychologically.  Next, we wanted to include a Study room that had a secret door passage behind a book case, which would lead to a torture chamber below the study.  The look of the study was inspired by the baroque interior and the images of Condemned 2. The torture chamber was inspired by the images of Hostel that I had brought in.              


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