00:02Poggi 16
00:05Hi guys, Ricky Martin here in a very fancy cinema.
00:08Today I'm in Bristol at world-renowned animation studio Aardman.
00:12One of Aardman's current projects is a game collaboration between Digixart Studio and Bandai Namco.
00:18More specifically, Aardman is designing and building the look that will set this game apart from anything else.
00:24Today we'll speak to art director Bram Twiem about the journey that led to the game's unique style.
00:29This is 1111, Memories Retold, Behind the Scenes.
00:35I'm Bram Twiem and I'm the art director for 1111.
00:39So it's my job to design, tickle and tease the visuals until they convey the story and moods that we
00:46want.
00:46So when I first heard about the project and the fact that Yeohan was keen to use an artistic style,
00:52I got very excited about plundering art history.
00:55World War I is probably largely responsible for kick-starting much of modernism in the 20th century.
01:01So when we went to Puy-de-Fu in France, it was a good opportunity for me to get a
01:06feel for the scope of the story.
01:08And it did have quite an influence on the art style itself.
01:13Futurism and Cubism I was very keen on because I liked the expressive nature and the rigidity of the styles.
01:20I did a couple of sort of tests on my own and it's fairly soon it became quite apparent that
01:28because they were quite brutalists and quite minimal in their look,
01:35they might be associated with low poly kind of stuff which is very prevalent in the gaming industry.
01:41So we wanted to get away from that and it just seemed more sensible to go for a more seductive
01:49art form.
01:50At one stage we were thinking of perhaps pursuing impressionism a bit more vehemently than we currently do.
01:57But as we were with the modernist movements, I decided it would be more sensible to not restrict ourselves in
02:05any way.
02:05So I decided to just pick a few painters that I like, like Turner who was able to convey an
02:14awful amount of emotion and mood with very little detail.
02:18And then other painters like Monet who've got a very interesting colour palette that they use.
02:25But beyond that there was Alexander Petrov who's a Russian artist who does oil on glass animations and that in
02:35particular is a theme that we pursued when we were developing the shader itself.
02:40After this we were lucky to work with artists such as Giorgio who has a wonderful use of light and
02:46paint strokes to help us realise the look we were going for.
02:50We started wondering about the possibilities of how to move strokes etc within the game to highlight certain aspects of
02:57the game and what colours we could use to convey the moods correctly and just the massive scope generally of
03:04this particular story.
03:05So we decided to go for something which is more just a painterly take on visuals.
03:11So what I'm hoping the players will feel once they've played this game is that they've engaged with two characters
03:16who've been through an awful lot.
03:19Both characters will change during the story and I want the players to feel that they've travelled with them.
03:25I think the art style will help convey the emotional journey by the fact that we can use things subjectively,
03:33we can use our paint strokes, angles and colour palettes and our lighting.
03:37All sorts of compositional tools to convey more convincingly and emotively the themes.
03:43The art style makes me feel very excited and a little bit nervous. I'm excited at the prospect of being
03:50able to create something that's quite unique I think.
03:53It's a really good opportunity to marry the practical skills together with the digital skills that I've acquired over the
04:00years and also see what other artists bring to the table.
04:04I tried to move away from the Imperial War Museum piece a little bit, it was a touchstone for Yellen
04:10but I was hyper aware of the intense processing power that those levels of effects tend to put on our
04:19systems.
04:19Long render times so I was concerned that the game engines wouldn't be able to handle it so we decided
04:25to break it down into more fundamental ingredients from the oil on glass technique.
04:31It is very tricky to get an engine to perform what we're trying to do because there's a lot of
04:37performance overheads and there's also just the fact that what we're trying to do is pretty uniquely human.
04:46So when a human is doing a painting they make thousands and thousands of decisions about what marks to make,
04:52what colours to use, where to make the strokes, what directions they should flow in.
04:56And that's a massive challenge for a game engine and that's the challenge we took on, how do we actually
05:02teach a game engine to paint.
05:06And that's it.
05:14It's really fun.
05:17It might be, that might be good.
05:18Isn't quite fun.
05:18We might use our leśli sidewall now.
05:19Oh, the chat trois where we are making a lot of Qué-coachers from the correctapa.
05:19I'm pieâlt.
05:19So, if you think that it's exciting, I know we do a bunch today.
05:20Hanging across this special creature estilo.
Commenti