Minor Project Interim Crit

Minor Interim

Minor Project: Initial Thumbnails

Minor Project: Influence Maps

Minor Project: The Game Mechanic's and Premise

The idea for the game is to create a digital set for an open world 'sandbox' video game based upon the Salvador Dali painting 'The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory' (1952-1954) below. 

The painting was Dali's response to the 1945 atomic bomb explosions, which became a topic of interest to him in the years following the event. He based this painting off of the notion that matter was made up of atoms that did not touch one another and thus the imagery in the painting is not only distorted but fragmented also, looking like a series of floating platforms.

In the sense of the games direction and how it would play out, I have decided to play off of the idea of a world that is becoming distorted and fragmented, and translate that into an explorable environment where the player is needed to restore the world to its original state. 

The game will centre around 'distortions', temporal anomalies that cause a certain area and everything in it to become warped, with different time zones; past, present and future clashing and altering the environment to impede the player's progress.

In order to progress through the game the player will have access to a relic with an ability that will allow them to combat and manipulate the environment. However, in order to prevent the player from progressing to the later stages of the game too early, the ability will need to be upgraded by exploring other distorted areas and finding similar relics that add further affects. 

The Premise

Minor Project Proposal V.2

Type of Project

Digital Set

Area of Study

Digital set, Set modelling, Lighting, Texturing

Idea

To create a digital set for a video game based on the painting The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memories by Salvador Dali.

Outcome

I want to create a 3D digital set that is fully modelled, textured and lit, that could be used within a video game. 

Goal

I want to improve my technical skills in terms of design, modelling, lighting and textures for video games. By the end of the project I aim to have a fully resolved environment suitable for a video game.

Surrealism: Salvador Dali

The Persistence of Memory

Dalí employed extensive symbolism in his work. For instance, the hallmark "melting watches" that first appear in The Persistence of Memory suggest Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. The idea for clocks functioning symbolically in this way came to Dalí when he was staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot August day.

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory

"In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg."

In this respect, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, which appeared in 1954, in hearkening back to The Persistence of Memory, and in portraying that painting in fragmentation and disintegration summarizes Dalí's acknowledgment of the new science.

Dalí had been greatly interested in nuclear physics since the first atomic bomb explosions of August 1945, and described the atom as his "favourite food for thought". Recognising that matter was made up of atoms which did not touch each other, he sought to replicate this in his art at the time, with items suspended and not interacting with each other. To Dalí, this image was symbolic of the new physics—the quantum world which exists as both particles and waves. The imagery of the originalPersistence of Memory can be read as a representation of Einstein's theory of relativity (although Dalí himself denied the connection to the theory), symbolizing the relativity of time and space. In this new work, quantum mechanics is symbolized by "digitizing" the old image.

Hieronymus Bosch

Romanticism

Paintings That Inspired Films

A little something to get me going really. I found an article on the Empire Magazine website about well known paintings that inspired designs for movies. Now I know I'm not doing a design for a movie but I thought it was an interesting comparison of art-to-film stills to see what film-makers draw ideas from. 

http://www.empireonline.com/features/paintings-that-inspired-the-movies

Goya's Colossus and Pacific Rim

Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad and Psycho

Escher's Relativity and Penrose Stairs and Inception

Minor Project: New Ideas

Following from a chat with Phil about my Templar idea, it was decided that there was a limited amount of wriggle room in terms of designing an environment. Due to a lack of personal style it would ultimately have ended up being a castle or fort which isn't really that interesting to look and thinking about, not a project that would have sustained my interest.

Instead, Phil recommended that I look back at my past projects and work on a project that helps improve my skills. Ideally this would be a project that requires me to explore it entirely through visuals, exploring concepts and ideas. In turn this would help me to better translate the concepts into a 3D environment.

An idea I had was surrounding the surrealist movement and incorporating the fantastical, dream like imagery into an environment for a game.