Subnautica: A game without guns, combat or killing

How Subnautica Succeeded Without Weapons

Ars Technica: Charlie Cleveland, design director for Subnautica, goes behind the scenes of the game’s development and explains how they crafted an exciting and dangerous experience without allowing the player to fight back. Charlie shows some early prototypes for Subnautica, and describes why they decided to create a game with primarily non-violent gameplay.

War Stories is a great series from Ars in which different game developers discuss what some of their biggest challenges were.

• Paul Neurath: How Thief’s Stealth System Almost Didn’t Work
• Glen Schofield: How Dead Space’s Scariest Scene Almost Killed the Game
• Casey Yano and Anthony Giovannetti: How Slay the Spire’s Original Interface Almost Killed the Game

See also: Other posts tagged ‘games’

How Wes Anderson’s style evolved after his animation work

How Wes Anderson’s Style Changed After Animation

Luís Azevedo: In this video essay we look at how Wes Anderson’s style has changed since making his first animation feature The Fantastic Mr Fox. Featuring films such as Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Isle of Dogs.

See also: The Art of Storytelling: Free online course from Pixar and Khan Academy

The story behind the game Divinity: Original Sin

Divinity: Original Sin Documentary

Gameumentary: Explore the very beginnings of Larian Studios and the Divinity franchise in our feature-length documentary. Discover the struggles the studio faced on their journey to becoming an independent studio, and how each game in the Divinity franchise laid the foundation for what would become, Original Sin.

See also

• The Making of Divinity: Original Sin 2 — A follow-up documentary exploring the making of the sequel.
• A history of the design of Magic: The Gathering cards
• Nintendo’s design documents from The Legend of Zelda

How movie trailers manipulate you

Vice News: These promos are “that one form of advertising that you actually want more of,” explains Jon Penn, CEO of the National Research Group. And thanks to an increase in online availability, they’re also easier to find, watch, rewatch, analyze and share theories about.

This trailer boom has lead to an increase in the number of trailers being cut and a robust job market for professional trailer makers. More work can mean more competition, too, as a studio will often hire several vendors to work on the same trailer, picking their favorite as the face of their film’s campaign. That means trailer makers are constantly one-upping each other to be the most eye-catching and innovative of the bunch.

See also: How to make a blockbuster movie trailer and other posts tagged ‘trailers’.

The Story of Tetris

Gaming Historian: In 1984, during the Cold War, a Russian programmer named Alexey Pajitnov created something special: A puzzle game called Tetris. It soon gained a cult following within the Soviet Union. A battle for the rights to publish Tetris erupted when the game crossed the Iron Curtain. Tetris not only took the video game industry by storm, it helped break the boundaries between the United States and the Soviet Union.

See also

• Tetris: The Games People Play — A graphic novel by Box Brown telling Alexey Pajitnov’s story.
• Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris — A fun music video.
• PC gaming history: Quake & Doom

Douglas Trumbull: Lighting the Starship Enterprise

Douglas Trumbull painstakingly crafted the visual effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Faced with an impossible timeline, him and his team completed more composites in six months than both Star Wars & Close Encounters of the Third Kind combined.

The first Star Trek film is often jokingly referred to as ‘The Slow Motion Picture’, and this sequence revealing the refitted Enterprise for the first time is by any reasonable standards hugely overlong. But honestly… I love it!

See also: Other posts tagged ‘Star Trek’

The Collection: Letterpress plates for print film advertisments

The Collection

The Collection is a short documentary about two friends, DJ Ginsberg and Marilyn Wagner, and their discovery of an astonishing and unique collection of movie memorabilia, comprised of over 40,000 printer blocks and 20,000 printer plates used to create the original newspaper advertisements for virtually every movie released in the United States from the silent period through 1984, when newspapers stopped using the letterpress format.

The collection, which spans nearly the entire history of the film industry from the silent era to 1984, was recently appraised at ~$10 million and is available for acquisition. (via Kottke)

What appeals to me about this story is less the collection itself, and more the opportunity to enjoy a project like this! To unpack all of these plates, clean them, print them, catalog them… Fun! One day I hope I make a similar discovery.

See also

• The man who made some of cinema’s most iconic movie titles — Title designer Dan Perri explains how he designed movie titles for films such as “Star Wars,” “The Exorcist,” and “Raging Bull.”
• The Great 78 Project — The Internet Archive will soon be home to hundreds of thousands of audio recordings that would otherwise be lost forever.
• Movie posters in motion — Wonderful animated movie posters by Pablo Fernández Eyre.

The Smash Brothers: How it became a competitive phenomenon, a documentary

The Smash Brothers documentary series

The Smash Brothers is a 9-part documentary series about seven of the greatest “smashers” of all time. Through years-long rivalries spanning coasts and countries, discover the passion for a game which started as a casual experience only to become a heart-pounding competitive lifestyle.

• Watch the YouTube playlist
• A history of ‘Doom’ & ‘Quake’.
• The Death & Rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV — A Noclip documentary series.

How Star Wars was saved in the edit

A video essay exploring how Star Wars’ editors recut and rearranged Star Wars: A New Hope to create the cinematic classic it became.

This RocketJump video essay has been doing the rounds, but it’s well worth watching if you haven’t seen it. It is full of examples that demonstrate the power of editing and includes some quality Star Wars trivia and fascinating deleted scene footage.

• Samuel R. Delany’s 1977 review of the original Star Wars — “This film is going to do very well, if not phenomenally so…”
• The Plinkett Test: How to sort characters from cut-outs — Game critic and writer Andy Kelly uses a clever test to identify if characters in video games he plays actually qualify as characters.
• ILM’s concept art for ‘The Force Awakens’ — “Out of our brainstorming sessions emerged visual imagery of where we might want to go and what it would look like when we got there.”

Goodbye uncanny valley

Alan Warburton: It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real… but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is… what happens now?

The future of visual effects

The Daily Conversation:

The future of visual effects in films, TV, and VR; from crossing the uncanny valley in human animation, to light-field camera technology that will change the way moving images are captured.

The Death & Rebirth of Final Fantasy XIV

The Death & Rebirth of FINAL FANTASY XIV Part #1 – “One Point O”

Noclip: In the first video in our three-part series, we tell the story of how the 1.0 version of FINAL FANTASY 14 came to be. How FINAL FANTASY 11 inspired its design, the ways in which the game fell short and how Square-Enix and the development team reacted to its failure.

See also: Other posts tagged ‘games’.

How Andrew Saladino makes his video essays

Push Process

The Royal Ocean Film Society: I’ve been asked a lot what the process of making these essays is like, but rather than just droll on about recording voiceover, late night editing sessions, and falling into despair upon seeing the first cut, I want to take these few minutes to talk about how that working process has evolved creatively over the past year, and about where I’m trying to take these essays in the future.

See also

• Cutting on sound: David Lean’s scene transitions — Despite whatever presets there are in Premiere, scene transitions are not limited to wipes, fades, or dissolves.
• Explore the ‘filmmaking’ tag or my new ‘video essay’ tag for lots more like this.

How to make a blockbuster movie trailer

Auralnauts: We provide you with the winning formula that turns any trailer into the blockbuster smash hit of the season it was meant to be.

See also

• Five ways movie trailers are all the same
• How to make a movie trailer (a song)
• The history of the movie trailer
• Other posts tagged ‘trailers’

Time for Sushi

Directed by David Lewandowski. Previously: going to the store and late for meeting.

Stick around until the end of this video for some ads for the incredible goods on offer in the official store of Lewandowski’s channel: goingtothe.store.

The future of independent, artisanal, high-effort nonsense on YouTube is uncertain. I appreciate your choice to support this work with the purchase of my unusual merch.

Deluxe Dakimakura Body Pillow

Enjoy the intersection of luxury and comfort in this Japanese-style body pillow. The 160 x 50cm pillowcase is made from durable, silky 2-way tricot material.

The incredible $90,000 Premium Edition Chess Set

Remember that time you watched that YouTube video? Why not commemorate the experience with a premium chess set carved in ethically sourced arctic mammoth ivory and rare meteorite alloy. Handcrafted by artisans specializing in these elements for a combined 38 years, this product reflects a dedication to premium YouTube memorabilia.

There are other more modest items too, like towels and pillow cases.

See also

• History of Japan — By Bill Wurtz.
• The Chickening — An insane remix of The Shining.
• Still File: Real recreations of computer renderings
• The business of GIFs: Then and now
• Master Works: Beautiful and unusual chess sets

Juno Perijove — Jupiter Flyby

A wonderful video by Seán Doran putting recent imagery from the Juno spacecraft to György Ligeti’s Atmosphères, famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

From the original video: This computer animation uses the JunoCam images of PJ-05 as textures, and SPICE trajectory data in order to reconstruct the flyby as seen from Juno’s perspective.

Above: Edits by Seán Doran // Below: as featured on APOD

On May 19, the Juno spacecraft once again swung by Jupiter in its looping 53 day orbit around the Solar System’s ruling gas giant.

APOD: Beginning at the top, this vertical 14 frame sequence of enhanced-color JunoCam images follows the spacecraft’s rapidly changing perspective during its two hour passage. They look down on Jupiter’s north polar region, equatorial, and south polar region (bottom images). With the field-of-view shrinking, the seventh and eighth images in the sequence are close-up. Taken only 4 minutes apart above Jupiter’s equator they were captured just before the spacecraft reached perijove 6, its closest approach to Jupiter on this orbit. Final images in the sequence pick up white oval storm systems, Jupiter’s “String of Pearls”, and the south polar region from the outward bound spacecraft.

See also

• JunoCam — A part of the Juno payload included by NASA for public outreach, to discuss and decide which points of interest on Jupiter should be photographed.
• The pastel astronomical drawings of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1882)
• Chart of human space exploration

What makes good game AI?

What Makes Good AI?

Game Maker’s Toolkit: When we talk about good AI, we often think about highly efficient and aggressive enemies in shooters like FEAR and Halo. But surely there’s more to good artificial intelligence than this?

See also: Other posts tagged ‘games’.

The hidden visual effects work of David Fincher

David Fincher – Invisible Details

kaptainkristian: A look at the hidden visual effects work of David Fincher’s filmography.

I knew that Fincher used a lot of CGI, but I had no idea how far he had taken this trickery. It’s hugely effective stuff.

See also

• Cameron Beyl’s Directors Series episode on Fincher
• Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting on Fincher

The art of subtitles in gaming videos

SovietWomble – The Art of Subtitles

Project Kino on the invisible art of SovietWomble’s subtitling craft. I’m not familiar with this particular YouTuber, but clever animated subtitling work on gaming videos — typically online shooters — are definitely an artform.

See also: Vanoss – Crafting Cinema in Video Games

How Tommy Wiseau blocks a scene

This Guy Edits: “The Room” by Tommy Wiseau is one of the best movie experiences you’ll ever have. I’m nerding out on Wiseau’s blocking, but there’s so much more to his genius. I truly am a big fan.

The Star Wars musical legacy in ‘Rogue One’

Rogue One: A Star Wars Legacy

You won’t hear the “Star Wars” theme in “Rogue One,” but the newest movie’s score does pack a bunch of other little musical references to the original saga. And if you reeeaaally strain your ears, you might actually hear that main theme after all. (via digg)

See also: Lord Of The Rings: How Music Elevates Story — Evan Puschak talks about Howard Shore’s use of leitmotifs.

Narita Boy

An incredible-looking game from Studio Koba, coming to Kickstarter soon!

You are Narita Boy, a legendary digital hero in an epic quest through simultaneous dimensions. The digital kingdom is under attack and you are called as their last hope of survival. Explore a vast world to find the techno sword, the only effective weapon against the threat.

The aesthetic of the game is inspired by retro pixel adventures (Castlevania, Another World, Double Dragon) with a modern touch (Superbrothers, Sword and Sorcery) and an 80s plot homage (Ready Player One, He-Man, The Last Starfighter), accompanied by the retro synth touch of the old glory days.

See also

• Animated GIF pixel art tutorials by Pedro Medeiros — 256×256 GIF tutorials!
• How Shovel Knight gets nostalgia right — “Some games are all about nostalgia – a reminder of how games used to be. No game nails this sensation quite like Shovel Knight.”
• Inside: surreal psychological cyberpunk nightmares as pixel art — A short film by Mattis Dovier.
• The best Logos from the Commodore Amiga Scene — A collection by Christian Kirchesch.

Thinking without Portals: Exploiting glitches to complete Portal in 14 minutes with only 15 portals

Portal Done with 15 Portals in 13:47 – Least Portals

FnzzyGoesFast: This is a segmented speedrun of Portal done with 15 Portals in the time of 13:47.640. This is the least amount of Portals that you can finish the game with. No scripts, hacks or cheat protected commands were used in this run.

Stuff like this blows my mind.

See also

• Portal: The world between two portals — Crowbcat created a Portal setup that had Chell, the game’s heroine, trapped between two portals that crushed her. The results were an astounding wonderland of psychedelic visuals.
• Portal Stories: Mel — a community made, free modification for Portal 2.
• qCraft: quantum physics in Minecraft — qCraft is not a simulation of quantum physics, but it does provide ‘analogies’ that attempt to show how quantum behaviors are different from everyday experience.

Tears in the Rain: A Blade Runner fan film made for just $1,500

Tears in the Rain

In a dystopian Los Angeles future, retirement engineer John Kampff hunts down suspected Replicant Andy Smith. As John soon learns, Replicant detection is nearly impossible without specialist equipment.

Christopher Grant Harvey: Making Tears In the Rain has been an arduous five-year journey. I had no idea what I was in for when I set out in 2012. A few years into the project I wanted to give up, I came very close, in fact, I gave up multiple times. I asked myself why this particular film was so important. At every stage, over the five year period, I sat with the project looming large and heavy over my shoulders. I would dedicate whole weekends in pursuit of perfection and wake up on Monday mornings only to be greeted by what I felt to be mediocrity. That said, there was a burning desire to succeed dwelling deep inside that didn’t entirely burn out.

See also

• Slice of Life — Another fan film set in the Blade Runner universe, currently in production.
• Fantastic behind the scenes photographs from the Blade Runner model shop

Planting and payoff in Mad Max: Fury Road

Planting and Payoff – Featuring Mad Max: Fury Road

Chez Lindsay: I wanted to do a brief overview of three non-dialogue elements from Mad Max: Fury Road — The silver spray, Max’s blood and Max’s boot. Your basic narrative planting and payoff will include a setup, a reminder, and the payoff.

See also: Other posts on this blog about Fury Road

See also

“Slice Of Life” is an original short Science Fiction film set in the Blade Runner universe.

While I’m not convinced that this will be a succesful a tonal match for Blade Runner, it has certainly nailed that 80s dystopian look. Most interestingly, this film is being made using old-school special effects techniques, like miniatures, matte paintings and rear projections.

For the huge advertising billboards we wanted to use rear projections. In a way because that’s how it was done in the 80’s, but also because if you film something with a camera it’s going to look much better than if it was added digitally. So we needed to design and animate a dozen of different advertisements, and then we project them on the buildings. It can’t get more analogue than that.

The Croatian filmmakers are uploading video production diaries as they go.

(via The Verge)

• Fantastic behind the scenes photographs from the Blade Runner model shop
• Judge Minty — a short film based on a minor character from the 2000AD strip, Judge Dredd.
• Akira fan made live-action trailer

The fundamental elements of film music

Filmmaker IQ: Explore the role of music in film from it’s importance in silent film to the elements and tools that modern composers use to create music for the silver screen. See how minor changes in momentum, depth and power can drastically alter the feel of a scene.

See also

• Lord Of The Rings: How Music Elevates Story — Evan Puschak talks about Howard Shore’s use of leitmotifs.
• What is the function of music? — A conversation with Jad Abumrad.
• And other posts tagged ‘filmmaking’.

Sherlock: How to film thought

Nerdwriter: Today I want to look at how Sherlock gets from point A to point B－from problem to solution; mystery to clarity－in one of the show’s most extraordinary visual revelations. It’s a sequence that lasts 3 minutes and 42 seconds with a fresh, weird idea in almost every beat.

Other Nerdwriter posts on this blog

• Casey Neistat: What You Don’t See
• Batman v Superman: The Fundamental Flaw
• Ghost In The Shell: Identity in Space

Epoch

By Ash Thorp

Epoch is an experimental film intended to take you on a voyage through our solar system and beyond. It is a personal project orchestrated to share our enjoyment and admiration for science fiction films and literature.

To optimize your viewing experience, Epoch is best experienced with a full screen, no artificial light intrusion, ample sound speakers, and an open mind free of predictions or expectations in order to allow the film to guide you on its expedition and take you to another place entirely.

See also: Wanderers — a short film by Erik Wernquist

Still File

…is a series of 4 photographs recreating computer renderings as physical scenes by Skrekkøgle, a product and digital design studio in Oslo.

Cube, sphere and cone geometry with material textures mahogany, clear glass and white marble. Placed on reflective checkers plane.

Floating colored cube without environment. Low greyscale resolution creates gradient banding in background.

Three white Utah teapots – scaled, rotated, intersected and distorted. Diffuse lighting, composed on matte yellow plane.

Patterned spheres with pink metallic texture. Panoramic photo of a beach added on cylindrical environment, mirrored in both the base plane and in the metal spheres.

See also: Other posts tagged ‘3D’ and ‘CGI’.