Group Project Madness: Part 1

For our project, we had a choice between either doing a recreation of London just before the great fire of London, and a horror level based off of the university’s Queen Building.

As I joined the group, the choice had already been made to recreate the Queen’s Building into a horror level.

In the concept stage, we had thrown around a few themes for our project and the one well had an agreement on was an abandoned asylum. The idea was that you would play as a person with severe schizophrenia and has voices that spoke in his head. He would have visions and flashbacks throughout the level which would shed more light on the background of the character.

We started researching on the ways in which other media and games portray horror through mood boards and experiencing the movies and games first hand by playing them.

We created mood boards to further our research and to complement our concept art.

I created mood boards looking at Resident Evil 5, Fear, Amnesia, thin dark corridors and caves. With these as influences, I created concept art that could create atmosphere through the use of lighting, shadows and unnerving silhouettes.

 

Amnesia

F.E.A.R

Resident Evil 5

Corridors

Caves

 I wanted to create more concept art involving a lot more of phobia such as heights, water, very claustrophobic areas, insects, etc.

Unfortunately our leader told us that we were to move on from the concept stage and onto the 3D asset creation. I felt that without the additional concepts, visions of our levels were left very scarce and as a group, weren’t able to synchronise our efforts.

With my first concept, I wanted to use shadows, lighting and silhouettes to create the feel and mood of the picture. I decided to leave out a shadow being casted from the left side of the painting to leave it open to encourage others imaginations of what could be round the corner, other than anchoring my own silhouette on it.

 

With my second concept, I wanted to play on the silhouettes even further as well as take painting to a little more with the environment. I started off my image as a greyscale painting and focused on the lighting. I added in the silhouettes to see how it would look.

 

 I followed on with colour to show the palette and the kinds of textures I had envisioned. I didn’t play on that too much as at the time I didn’t want it to be a main focal point.

Lastly I wanted to show both combined together to see its effects. I wanted the sinister shadows to look quite uncanny and unsure of its appearance so I created them with a slight deformed silhouette.

I added elements into the image that would make the viewer feel very uncomfortable if he was there such as a foggy floor and water pipes burst open and oozing out substances.

With my third piece, I wanted to not have shadows play such a large role as opposed to the previous concept ideas, but to involve the colouring of the lights. I used red and green lights to induce a slight uncomfortable and panic like moods to the image.

When including the silhouettes, I didn’t want to paint them in as just similar to shadows this time around. I decided to slightly hint to the look that they could be sporting, such as strait jackets and stringy parts coming out of their clothing. I added fog into this piece as well to slightly add to the slight chaotic atmosphere.

I feel that it was a big mistake moving onto the 3d assets without getting down a collection of concepts to guide our theme forward.