Inspirations: Eyvind Earle

Now that all the characters are completed, I’ve switched gears and am concentrating on refining the Forest environments. Looking through my folder of inspirations and reference material I come again and again back to this man’s work. Eyvind Earle was perhaps most famous for art directing and painting the backgrounds for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. I’ve admired the style of that film my whole life.

We decided from the beginning to not try to create anything realistic looking. No photographic bark and leaf textures. In fact in The Path we are using gothic ornaments and its funny how this still gives the feeling of leaves. While I don’t try to copy what this guy has done, very modern, very 1950s, I do get into the way his orderly patterning looks. At the same time, I like the chaos of a forest with branches jutting out randomly, creating spooky silhouettes. We want players to be reminded that a forest is a wild unknowable place constantly changing. I think the atmosphere we are creating shares Earle’s use of the stark blackness of the trees, punctuated by shocking colors.

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All characters are modelled.

All 14 characters have been modelled and are at the rigger’s to get their skeleton fitted in, and then we’ll give them skin. This is quite a monumental milestone for us because it’s been an extremely tedious and long winded process to get all those characters modelled. Especially because we were hoping to hire a professional expert for this job but all the people we tested with disappointed in one way or another. It would appear to be impossible to find somebody who combines technical skills with an artistic style that matches our work.

We really had not scheduled any time for Auriea to model all these characters but she ended up doing it anyway. And they look great! 🙂

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Live from the glamourous world of game development…

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Images of process

I get a kick out of the unfinished; The unexpected beauty of glitches, the aesthetic quality of things one never sees in a finished game. In this case, its the glowing bones from the girl’s rigs that caught my eye. This odd sort of photography takes place often while I work. So, occaisionally I will post things like this. Celebrating my techno-fetishism. Roaming that Uncanny Valley forever.

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Inspirations!

Well, this blog will not be all official reports. We want to keep it casual and present things also which we’re looking at and that are keeping us going. So to start, here are two strange and wonderful animated music videos I ran across last night. The first is drawn and animated by  Kondoh Akino. Its just the sort of eerie thing I love to watch while working out character designs. 

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