Creative Direction

Projects 1,2 and 3 so far in studio 2 have all revolved around creating different experiences for a player through utilising emotion. Firstly through the personal experience game giving the player a memory of your own so personal that they would definitely connect with it. Secondly creating a game to reproduce art which in its own right can be incredibly expressionistic but giving the players the chance to interact with it on a deeper level. Finally the MusicVideoGame working for a client to produce a particular meaning and outcome based off their pre produced track. All of these tasks have given me great insights into how other forms of art other than video games are created and convey their messages. This post will dissect the processes and research I completed to accomplish these tasks.

When researching sculpture trying to find context for my second game Mobilised Artefacts I was fortunate enough to have a wealth of knowledge at hand. My mother had been an artist for over 10 years and won the Tom Bass Figurative Sculpture Curator's choice and People's choice awards. Her explanation of how to take sculpture non-literally was incredibly helpful in the creation of the project. My mother has worked collaboratively with indigenous women and was able to pass onto me great detail about both cultural sensitivity specifically within that community and how art and sculpture is perceived in the Aboriginal communities. I researched the Australian Government's Website to find specific information about Australian Indigenous ceremonies for the specific reason that the wording of the document as it's published by the Government would be culturally appropriate which would not only give me the knowledge I would need but further my understanding of my creative boundaries. This informed my game design decisions dramatically over the process and instead of recreating the artwork literally I adopted a style of taking Ken Thaiday’s meaning behind his work and giving it my own form. Although I chose to look at Thaiday's meaning I still managed to keep similarities in the work specifically keeping the animal being a shark.

Ken Thaiday Sr is a famous Torres Strait Island artist who creates “Dance Machines” which are modern interpretations of his cultural ceremonial headdresses. He is one of the most well known indigenous artists in Australia and is a key figure in the sculpture community. Thaiday utilises both modern and traditional materials like lightweight plastic to make the enormous mechanical headdresses wearable and more traditional like feathers to create ornate details.The core concept of Thaiday's work is to capture the essence of the traditional dances where when the masks are worn the dancers become the animals.

The art piece I specifically took inspiration for my game “Mobilised Artefacts” was Thaiday's “Beziam Headdress” which was exhibited in the Gallery of Modern Art showcase “Time and Tides”. This sculpture depicted a hammerhead shark which Thaiday believed brought danger and violence to his dances “When I'm dancing (wearing the headdress) I become the shark. From my observation I'm showing how it comes up to get the live bait by simulating its jaw movements.” . This change in tone for the dance is what I tried to capture and reproduce into my game. To accomplish this I used music which was quite ambient but also had sharp notes which added tension and mystery. This washed out sound also represents the feeling of being under deep water. The unorthodox creation using the MetaBall tool to form the body of the shark was also tied to the way Thaiday represented movement and form and the transformation of inanimate to natural with his masks.

The client described on his soundcloud page his overarching theme of dance music. However when it came to project 3 the particular track didn’t fit that theme, after researching his personal blog I found his more fitting descriptors of “a slightly ambient, hip hop/trap flavoured electronic track that had a subtle melancholic tone to it.” (Wilson 2017) Luckily for our team Izaac had a very clear image and direction he wanted to take the project in and was able to give us key examples of other music videos which he wanted to emulate, one in particular was “Eh” by Death Grips. By dissecting the film clip the team was able to discern that Death Grips utilised real life footage and abstracted it by turning the people into neon signs. The camera had a vignette to hone the viewers eyes to the vibrant pulsing colours which pulsed to the beat of the song. When we created Latex Basic the overall theme of taking the real life modern world and abstracting it was the absolute core concept. To tie this together into a game we as a team recreated downtown neon Tokyo in three distinct districts all in Voxel Art. This created a more stylised version of the downtown Tokyo area but was not enough layers of abstraction. Instead of adding just another mechanic which was talked about such as an effect similar to chromatic aberration the team took Isaac's personal message behind the track which music videos often do to create game play. “The message could be that the world is a very depressing and gritty place however it's up to you to see beauty or colour in things, which relates back to the player and his or her decision to put colour wherever they feel is best”, to accomplish this we handcrafted a dark almost monochromatic world but when the player passed their controlled cursor over select objects they would light up giving them the power Izaac was looking to give them.

“Today, repetition is not only the main building block of a number of musical genres - e.g. jungle, hip-hop, and techno - the careful balance of repetition and variation is also the base of most rhythm games.” This repetition spoken about by Pichlmair & Kayali was definitely evident throughout our clients track, trying to create a cohesive experience around this while creating a diverse area was a very carefully designed aspect of the game. To do so we made the aforementioned distinct areas where although the base track was the same as the player would move from industrial to commercial layers of the track synced up and changed and again happening in the transition between commercial and residential.

Creating a MusicVideoGame was incredibly enlightening as having no part in the creative idea concepting but working to a very select set of criteria will be an incredibly beneficial experience for when I am working in the industry.