Lurk - Working on the Cinematic 3

   Very much like the motel room scene at the beginning, I took some time to add more details to this underground subway tunnel. The characters were of course drawn in more detail as well (Compared to the stick figures in the concept art). This just gave me the opportunity to include Sister Diawara and Father Alex in another scene (Funny that his face isn't shown once again, however).

   It was from here that I tried to decide what other key scenes I should include within such a short span of time. I reluctantly wounded up dropping the soldier encounter and exploration scene in the end to at least include one scene with a monster in it (The static montage at the beginning doesn't necessarily count). I had hoped to include more, but once again was short on time (This was also another monster design I need to draw up clearly for my concept art book, most of the other monsters didn't seem like the shrieking sort and so I had to quickly design up another one).

   The last scene I wanted to keep was of Jessie's mother as she is staring at her (Or perhaps, at you) from across her seat in the train carriage. She appeared too sweet in the original drawing that I used for the animatic, and so aside from fixing her pose a little, I had to fix up her face a little. I am a little saddened that some of her beauty was taken away in this new version, but I think a creepiness factor was far more important for this scene (And that bloody looking shading on her cardigan was completely unintentional).

Resketching her pose.

Lurk - Working on the Cinematic 2

   This was a scene that stuck with me even during the early days of Lurk, and seeing as I couldn't fully animate them, I had to make their poses stand out (Strong poses, right?) as much as possible, which was a huge challenge. While Father Alex was a toughie to draw simply because of my rusty drawing skills, Sister Diawara was the bigger challenge. 

   I have long since characterised her as an eccentrically calm character as compared to everybody else, and so I had the toughest time figuring out what pose to give her without actually making her out of character (Not that anyone would know what her character was like... EXCEPT FOR ME). When I get around to animating this scene, I'm definitely going to video tape some references for it as well.

  The background itself was a heavily altered photo that I took of my friends' creepy basement (And I mean creepy, I seriously wish I could have used more of the photos I took of that place for this project).

   Another scene that I had to scrapp would have introduced the next key character to the series. Seemingly your stereotypical soldier and practically the only one competent to defend themself against such creatures, this soldier encounters Jessie in 3/4 ways of the plot. While the original design had been a male soldier named Peter, I found myself growing more interested in designing a female solder, which I will discuss more about in the character design post. But, as you can see, I thought I could have hidden his or her face for the time being for this scene, before of course excluding it from the cinematic.

   And here was the bit from the animatic that I had attempted to animate.

Lurk - Working on the Cinematic 1

Original Concept Art

   For the first scene, I didn't make all that many changes to it based on the animatic from the previous post, I just cleaned up and redrew a few details on the television. After wasting my time trying to remember how to use After Effects (When you are rushing, it's obvious that you can refamiliarise yourself or experiment as much as you would like), I ended up designing a seperate static montage, erased out the white screen, and placed the television later on top of it.

   I practically did the same for motel room design, cleaning up and adding in some more details insead of leaving it as a blurry charcoal-looking mess (And so I had the chance to mess around with some more brushes other than the usual hard brush that I have grown so accustom to using). I definitely could have added in more details (Such as perhaps making it rain outside the window), but I know I had to hurry on and work on other scenes and so left it as it is. Getting the lighting was the trickest part for this scene, as I was never necessarily sure how much of the area would be lit up by the television, or whether I should just make some creative decisions by showing more of the room than I should.

   In my rush, I simply drew a still image of Jessie once the camera pans out to show her outside of the room. As suggested however, I ended up redrawing her and attempted to add a tiny bit of animation by making her e--

OH SWEET LORD.

   To finish up the overall look of this scene, I messed around with a few texture and layer options. Now, while I am discussing these scenes in order, that doesn't mean that I actually did them in order (HAH!). Before I went back to finish up this scene, I experimented with a texture overlay for another scene and found myself enjoying the color and feel it actually gave to it (Which I will show in the next post) and so decided to do the same for this scene along with a few others. 
   
   The scene that would have followed after that was a close up of her as she shifts about restlessly as she attempts to call her father on her phone. Aside from lack of time, a fully animated scene would once again not go with the rest of the cinematic's simplified movements (Which you will see more of in the next post). I would of course love to animate this scene one day and put together a proper animation as I had originally intended, but for now...

   This scene was also scrapped for the same reasons, I had spent days figuring out her pose (You can't imagine the awful (In more ways than one) stuff I find when googling 'unconcious girl', also, I had no idea you can fall unconcious with your eyes open) as she lays on the ground before deciding to scrap it all completely. While I had attempted to keep the scene where she would come to and look at around for a moment... you probably know what became of that too...

   I know that she looks pretty different here as compared to the previous scene, hopefully the similar pose still clued you in that they are actually the same person. I was happy with the slightly 3D-ish look the wall has.

I still really do like how my sketch for this turned out, though.
So again, one day... ONE DAY.

   

   And this was the new version, a still illustration with some flickering lighting and a shadow passing over her... It doesn't look too bad, I guess.. It was also here that I began to realise how difficult it was to make her poses appear natural with such large scarf/poncho wrapped around her top half. Future considerations is that I will have to take reference photos if when I finally get the chance to come back to this concept.

Final Tutorial

   I am happy to hear that my rewritten dissertation is a huge improvement to my original one (And I honestly have Fiona to thank for for this). While what I have will suffice for the time being, there are a few other things I should consider including in there. For the conclusion, I could try to make a more personal statement (Well, not too personal, I'm honestly going to try and make everything in third person if I can) about the things a game designer should consider when creating a video game with a strong narrative. Eg, "As a game designer, it would be prudent, based on the research show in this dissertation that..."\

   Seeing how Ed Hooks has been such a huge part of this dissertation, I was also suggested to add the discussion on 'ma' back in there (I had initially taken it out in fear that I would go over the word count), and revolve it around The Last of Us (And probably GTAV with Michael De Santa's character), the characters in both these games have shown example of such a principle, where they are actually allowed to sit and reflect, instead of expressing it all through words.

May Draft 9/13 be my final draft....

   Hopefully, I can quickly finish up these changes and get my friend to proofread it one last time before we  go off to get it printed this coming Friday (ZOINKS).

   As for my practical, it would be benficial to present a larger range of emotions for my characters, particularly Jessie, who appears despondent for most of the animation thus far (This would also go hand in hand with my dissertation, especially after the analyse I did on Silent Hill 3's Heather Mason and the broad range of emotions she has in the game). I coud try to add in a few creepy details too, such as a monster's shadow passing over Jesse before she comes to after the train accident. And a vignette closing in around her mother in that one scene... Also, during the opening sequences, I should give glimpses of the monster designs I did, while they won't be animated, the least I could do is incorporate more of my concept art in there somehow.

Fourth Tutorial Session

   I wasn't able to attend yesterday's tutorial session due to being ill but I did write down a few questions I wanted to ask my lecturer about my dissertation:

1. How do I reference emails:Eg, 'Email Correspondence with Ed Hooks, Date'
2. Despite not really mentioning some games, can they still be listed in the bibliography?
   
         Yes, as well as books, articles, so long as they have impacted your research in some way, they can still be included in there despite not being cited within the essay.
3. While it is not mandatory, how do we incorporate our practical into the dissertation if we decide to?
   
         Mention it briefly in the introduction (Why am doing this research and how does it support my practical) and conclusion (Eg, Tried to approach empathetic characters as Ed Hooks has suggested) 2 paragraphs at most.
4. How did games like L.A Noire, The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls avoid the issue of the Uncanny Valley?
   
         Actually, L.A Noire still suffers from this, seeing as they were attempting to recreate subtle facial movement that game rigs could not pull off. Wrapping around real video footage. Beyond: Two Souls has really heavy focus on the face. The Last of Us is a little more cartoony than the rest and wasn’t trying to be photo realistic.
5. What makes the characters of Telltale Games strong in terms of empathy?
   
         It's story, environment, situation, the decision making, pushing you into that role. Emoting with them. Brilliant voice acting.  Connects to first chapter about voice actor or the animator?
6. Should I narrow things down even further?
   
         Nah.

   I was also advised to get some strong poses done for the characters in my concept, and while also incorporating them into various scenes, make it so that one scene alone will actually be able to tell a story to those that view it. And there's also the academic poster, which isn't all that bad, I will most probably be making it far more visually heavy than text heavy when the time comes to work on it.

   But yes, it's time I finish up this draft a little more before uploading it to the eStudio, next week onwards, I hope to get more work done for my practical, so that I could actually send an animatic to my music and sound composer.

Third Tutorial Session

   So far so good, while progress for my dissertation may be a tad slow on my part (Due to issues with note gathering and a little writer's block), it would seem that I am still able to keep up with the pace suggested and given to by our lecturer. I will be further narrowing down on the topic that is to be focused upon as well as combine the chapters of "Motion Capture" and the "Uncanny" (Not just the Uncanny Valley, but the Uncanny as a whole) into one (Seeing that they both link strongly to one another in many areas and examples).

   While it has initially been narrowed down from all forms of media (Movies, TV shows, video games, etc.) to video games, it would be wise to narrow it down even further to a particular genre of games (Seeing as I have already unknowingly placed a strong focus on one genre in particular, that being the horror genre) that are known for their heavy focus on narrative and cinematic. to In terms of research, to further add to my growing list of books, video games and online articles, I will be looking up a few articles from the Edge magazines available in the library (Curse their shiny paper, though), particularly the issues that were highlighting video games such as "Beyond Two Souls" and "The Last of Us". (Another game I should probably look into is the "Broken Sword" series)

   Based on my introduction, I was also told to further expand upon the differentiating views of practitioners Ed Hooks and Jamaal Bradley (Two considerably big names in the animation industry, in their own way) in consideration to the future of video games narrative. It would also be interesting to discuss the difference in rotoscoping and motion capture, not particularly on the technical areas but more so on how they effectively applied to the animation itself. I should also continue looking into video games with interesting monster designs and animation as reference for my practical ("Forbidden Siren" especially comes to mind).

   I do feel that I had already gathered a decent amount of research (Which I believe will be four pages worth of bibliography), and so right now, I seriously need to get down to some skim reading (As I will no longer have enough time to properly read through every single one of them like I did with the first few books, still, hopefully I will still be able to take some thorough notes for a few of them) and start writing more than half of the dissertation before Christmas comes around.

For my reference in terms of listing down notes from live events I have attended:
Name of the talk, Venue, Date, Event it took place in

Interview with Shanen Pae

   Shanen Pae is a close friend of mine whom I was incredibly fortunate to befriend just a few years back. Having studied at the the Art Centre College of Design, she has recently been busy working as a visual development concept artist, and has been hired to work on several well known game titles (With one of them being "Mafia 3"). And so, I decided to ask her a few questions to see what her perspective as concept artist is on narrative storytelling:

1. What are your thoughts on colors and lighting when painting a setting and creating that atmosphere that is suitable to a specific scene?

Storytelling! I tend to be very direct and just light things in a way that frames the focus of the image, along with creating nice shapes in the composition. Dark against light, light against dark, a backlit silhouette, a figure through venetian blinds. If you're doing sequentials, it's good to plan out your scene for consistency and design your frames around that space you've set up. 

2. What are the most important features of a character in hopes of bringing out their personality?

Relatability. Substance is foremost - a great design communicates your first impression of what a character is like, great acting either confirms or defies it. Yes, that tiny anthropomorphized kitty with the large eyes and round head is adorable as she seems, or, ah! The giant barbarian with the handlebar moustache is actually a cowardly lunk.

3. Is it possible to evoke empathy during the concept stage?

Yes! Again, creating with context is what clues people's imaginations in on what a character is like or what's happening in a scene. It's fine to do the concept art guy™ standing around in space if you're figuring out the design part, people do look at these kinds of pictures and say, "I relate to this because it looks like me," or, "he looks like an ex-boyfriend of mine" and find themselves immediately connecting in that way. I'm a big fan of emotion through action, though, and a sucker for storyboard panels or things that are otherwise beautifully cinematic. Two kids playing Nintendo in the long red lights of the 5pm sun, a lover's quarrel admist a sea of grey, apathetic faces, hellfire raining down on us from the Northern Lights, all the things you can imagine and capture in a still image.

4. Have you considered how well most of your concepts translate into the finished product?

Ya! For a lot of things you just have technical restrictions, like when something's gonna be 3D printed the modeller'll tell you that edges have to be a certain minimum thickness, things like that. Sometimes it's a matter of time or ambition or skill, sometimes it's a matter of art direction and marketing hierarchy, the bane of the independent creative. 

5. How much do you go about in the facial details/expressions and body language of a character?

As much as they'll pay me, haha. Jk. it's important to me, especially for personal projects. I won't talk about draftsmanship, because a pixel game like Earthbound was enough to make me bawl my eyes out. But you need to concentrate on the messages you're trying to communicate through your work, always, and consider the whole package involved in getting those points across. I'm influenced by anime and Disney, and character acting is something I find not only aesthetically juicy but a channel for my own feelings, too, so I pay special attention to it. Don't you feel a pang of Chihiro's sadness when you see her glassy eyes and giant Ghibli teardrops? So good.

Email Interview with Ed Hooks

   Whilst Rosy has passed on the videos and recordings she had made for her CoP2 project (Which I still hope to make good use of for my research), I still found it necessary to personally email Ed Hooks on a particular section of his book, that being his chapter on animation in video games. Seeing as the book was written in 2011, I wanted to know whether his opinion had changed since then, especially after the release of critically acclaimed titles such as "The Last of Us", and even "Beyond: Two Souls", which I believe focus on a more interactive form of storytelling (Along with many other recent games) as compared to older games that had originally focused solely on gameplay.

  Needless to say, I was absolutely nervous as I wrote this email, fearing that my questions would be nothing but nonsensical to the father of acting in animation. But, taking a deep breath, I decided to go right ahead and ask him the first few questions that came to mind. It was through his site that I was able to find his email, and thanks to Rosy (Again), we were able to properly speak to one another from there.

This was the message that I had sent him through his site, when he attempted
to contact me, there were once again issues with my Yahoo email. But fortunately,
by mentioning Rosy, he went on to contact her about me so that I could share with
him another one of emails for contact.

My first email:

'Hello Sir!

Rosy forwarded me your email!

I am terribly sorry about the email issues, for some reason my Yahoo email has been having a lot of issues as of late. But I am sure we will be able to communicate through this email instead (If not, my professional email is wholahayola@gmail.com)

Thank you so, so much for the incredibly fast response!

I would like to start off by saying that I absolutely enjoyed reading your book "Acting for Animators", out of all the books I have been reading for my research, your book has given me so much to think and write about (I especially find the aspect of empathy to be an incredibly interesting topic and issue to look into when it comes to acting in animation). I however do have a few questions to ask about your Video Games chapter.

I was wondering whether your opinion has changed since then? About whether video game acting has actually improved since then?

Your chapter on empathy especially got me curious about whether you have tried any other games aside from "Ico". I was wondering what your thoughts on games such as "The Last of Us" might be, especially? And whether you have managed to find games that have more humour to them as compared to "Call of Duty"?

I am still listing down some more questions to ask, but for now, I am absolutely dying to know about your thoughts on the progression of video games so far.

Thank you kindly!

Yours Sincerely,

Rebecca Wong Si-Lin'

His response (About an hour later):

'Hey Rebecca,

I'm glad you found me. <g> I often have difficulty with e-mail addresses in the far east. The company that hosts my domain name, edhooks.com, is Earthlink, and it blocks many addresses over there, presumably because of piracy issues. It is a hassle.

In answer to your question, my answer will probably surprise you: I do not play video games. I teach for all of the major studios -- most recently for Valve and Warner Brothers Games -- and I understand the acting issues the studios encounter, but I do not personally play games. Well, Monument Valley on my iPad now and then, but that's about it. Having said that, I do make it a practice to study the walk-throughs now and then. When I know I am going to be teaching at a particular studio, I will always review their most recent games to see what I might be dealing with.

"The Last of Us" is basically a game-length cinematic, IMO, and it has much stronger performance than the typical game. It also has a very clever design, putting a child in a lead roll. That - all by itself - is going to evoke an emotional response in the player because it triggers an evolutionary impulse to protect our children. Very smart.

"Ico" was the first game I saw that did anything special with empathy, which is why I mentioned it in the book. An essential element of empathy is distance. You cannot empathize with yourself and, since the player is imposing himself or herself on his or her avatar, the player cannot empathize with his own avatar. At least not to the extent that the avatar is responsive to direct instruction. (Go left, shoot gun, turn 360 degrees….)

My impression is that cinematics in general are being phased out. The smaller the platform, the less well the cinematics function. That evolution has caused the studio job of Level Designer to be the hot ticket, career wise. Especially the Level Designer who has some understanding of acting, emotion and empathy. When I first started teaching at the game companies, it was really difficult to get Designers to take the class. They considered that anything and everything having to do with acting was something for the animators to worry about. They were thinking of themselves mainly as programmers, and so there was a systemic division in most studios -- programmers on one side, animators on the other. Mocap was somewhere in the middle but, in the beginning, I also rarely had mocap directors in the class. Today, it is different. Wherever I teach, the classes have representatives of all divisions, and I expect that trend to continue.

Ed'

   I will surely be sending more questions his way as I progress in my dissertation, until then, I do believe that I have gotten quite a bit of useful information from this response alone. I am glad that I had finally taken the chance to contact him. Hopefully I will be a lot less awkward in my next email to him.

Second Tutorial Session

   Today's tutorial session was another incredibly productive one, to say the least (I'm starting to think that 20 minutes might not even be enough for these tutorials the further we progress for this module, heh), though I am still trying to figure out how on earth I am going to write all of this down and keep all my note and research gathering in check as I work on my dissertation and practical piece. Anyway, there was a lot that was discussed upon today, so hopefully I actually remember the particularly important bits that I can make proper use of for my project.
  
   Aside from demonstrating whatever project planning and time management that we have done for this project (Which I have already shown during last week's casual tutorial), we were also had to show any sort of progress we happen to have for our practical piece. And while I didn't necessarily have any sort of prototyping to show, I did have a few rough sketches to show for today on the main character and monsters that will be featured in the concept bible (And to a lesser extent, the short animation that will go with it).

   Having shared whatever sketches I have brought in today, Annabeth kindly reminded me on the importance of how a good story should have a metaphor, and that these monster concepts should actually represent something. For my project, I do actually have an idea on what my monsters are meant to represent. As I continued sketching out concepts, I began to realise how they all tend to revolve around religion, and that these demons and distorted images of saints could possibly represent a possible rapture even, in terms of the storyline (At this moment, I am constantly thinking about movies such as "Cloverfield" when it comes to the situation that takes place within the story, but it definitely is an interesting idea where only a small selection of human remains).

   Breaking away from the stereotypes of most horror games is indeed a challenge, so the next best thing to do is to find someway to go about it where these well known traditions, stereotypes and tropes can still be applied effectively. Taking the ordinary and giving it the twist it needs will be one of the biggest challenges I will have to face during this project.

   I was also advised to do a little study on video games (So there are definitely a lot of playthroughs to watch over the next few months, this data can also be added to the appendix of my essay) and collect data by looking into what my competition is doing, what tropes have been used over the years with most horror games, regardless of what horror genre it is (Why is the dark scary? What are the origin of these fears?). What locations (Subways, Shopping Malls, Motels, Museums... Hospitals), tools and situations are the most used? This will help further develop the design bible and story building (As well as something to reference in the essay).

  In terms of literature research, I was referred to the site Gamasutra and magazines Edge, Retro and Imagine FX that should be available in the library.

First Tutorial Session

   Considering the fact that my mind has been all over the place in the past few weeks whilst getting this dissertation together, I felt that I was finally progressing in a better direction during today's tutorial session with Annabeth.

   Despite the fact that we have narrowed it down to video games since my presentation (Instead of attempting to cover all forms of media, though they still could be briefly written about within the dissertation), there are definitely a lot of areas that can still be discussed upon from there.

   I was gently reminded that it should be the acting that I must analyse in this dissertation (A good reminder seeing as I tend to go off topic way too easily), and not the premise of the story (Granted, that can be mentioned if it adds to my argument), otherwise, I should simply be focusing on screenplay writing than acting in animation.

   Other games that I was referred to are 'Eternal Sonata', 'Ni No Kuni', 'Shenmue', 'Team Fortress 2', 'Ico' (Seeing that it was also mentioned in Ed Hooks' book), 'Shadow of the Colossus', 'Journey' (Unique for their lack of dialogue), and particularly, 'Thomas was not alone' (Regarded as one of the most uniquely empathetic indie games around, the game is unique for its minimalistic approach (Think "The Dot and the Line"), which makes one question just how far they can remove you from that emotional marker. The quality of the movements of these 'characters' give off a special sort of performance hardly ever seen in most games. But another question that comes to mind is whether the voice over contributes far more to the game than the animation does?

   I should definitely focus on more recent game titles (Seeing as I have to show how far games have come along as well as how much more still needs to be done before they can reach the same level as empathy as contemporary animations in other medias), but old game titles from past consoles can also be briefly mentioned in a background write up on the progress of games.

   While I do believe that there are a few good examples where games with heavy dialogue can still tell a good story, exposition is still considered a no-no when it comes to successful storytelling for games (And quite frankly, not many can pull it off).

   All these indie games tends to lead to another interesting question, about why is it that independent game developers are much more successful in producing as compared to major game studios, while both types of studios definitely have their hits and misses, indie games are faring much better when it comes to presenting games as works of art as compared to bigger studios.

   Another game that Annabeth referred me to was 'Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons', which could be use as my argument against Ed Hook's statement due to its quality acting and performance. These following games have a more unique style to them and are necessary for comparison with more realistically styled games. And while 'Heavy Rain' and 'Beyond: Two Souls' have already been listed under my list of references, I feel that it is necessary to have a much more thorough look into Quantic Dreams' works due to their specialty in motion capture technology and heavy focus on dramatic narratives (And so 'Fareneheit' and 'Kara' also comes to mind by this stage).

   I also still feel that interviewing Ed Hooks (Or at least asking a few questions) would benefit me in my research, to see how much his opinion has changed since his book was first published. The only issue I am presently dealing with at the moment is figuring out how to properly word what it is that I wish to say to Mr Hooks, while I disagree with some of the things that he has written, I most certainly do not want to come off antagonistic in any way. In the meantime, I definitely still have a lot more books to read up on, but at the same time, I should probably consider what questions I should actually ask before I run out of time.