Category: Design for Animation, Narrative Structures & Film Language

Ghost of Tsushima was released the 17 of July, and since then a lot of people enjoyed it, talk about it and one thing that stands out of the game is the visual art and storytelling capabilities. I personally enjoyed it a lot playing the game and just walking around discovering more and more places around the world of Ghost of Tsushima.

I like to take this opportunity and explore a bit more but this time, the behind the scenes of the games. We are gonna discuss a few aspects of the art, we are gonna see from concept arts, storytelling desitions and narrative and final looks and how all this was created.

We are gonna start with some concept art. The next images are from the ideation and design of the main character, we can see all the preparation and sketches created. There are a lot of designs that most likely didn’t go throw till the end of the production.

As we can see, there is a lot of design and ideas, here we can see a more final look to what’s gonna be in the end referencing the sketches seen previously.

Here you can see a more advance sketch with colour to design more how is gonna look, and the process until the final look idea, not the look in the game.

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Here are some designs ideas and research for other secondary characters and enemies:

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We’ve seen some of the processes behind the design for characters. Now we are gonna look into a bit of the idea behind the cinematics and also some of the environment sketches and starting process.

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This is some of the ideas for the environment a bit more developed with colour and you can see better what’s gonna look like at the end. And here is a first look at the development of such an environment already a bit more advance and implemented in a 3D world.

Now, a big part of this game is about the story itself, and how immersive it is. So I would like to share with you a few of the storylines and sketches that made the end result that good.

As you can see, when a storyboard is done well and with a clear idea, the end result explains a lot better the story in question and it makes it easier for the rest of the team to build this magic moments ingame.

I encourage you guys to play this game because its a masterpiece, the story, the looks of it, and the gameplay its really cool and super well done.

This past 5-6 years while I was either doing personal work or Uni assignments there are a few questions and topics that interested me and I always wanted to do a bit more research on it or at least learn a bit more of them.

VIRTUAL PRODUCTION – CAMERA TECHNOLOGY

With camera technology, I’m referring to Blade Runner 2049. On the last year of my Bachelor degree, we went on a trip to the VFX Fest in Stuttgart, where I attend a really interesting talk about how they did the camera movement on Blade Runner 2049. It was basically with an Xbox controller, and that choked me and I always wanted to lock more into it.

REAL-TIME RENDERING

There is one video that got me into real-time rendering, Adam: Episode 1. This is an amazing project where everything is rendered in real-time, at any point in time you can pause the video and look around like a videogame, these guys are just amazing and I would love to know more about this technique. You can see the video I’m talking about here.

SFX/VFX/PRACTICAL CREATURE EFFECTS

I don’t really know much about the world of SFX that I like to research more of how they work and how can they be implemented with VFX.

FACE CAPTURE

Face capture technology is evolving really fast , we could put this and real-time rendering together.

MOCK-UP/ PROP MAKING

I would like to research how they work with the mock-ups in movies, for example when they recreate an entire city at a really small scale and then integrate that with real world.