Video games like animation often begin as drawings. Just as some artists use animation as their main communication channel, some artists use video games and video games like animations begin as storyboards. However a game storyboard is set out differently because you have different event levels or plot points that define the game world that you are devising. There will be structural issues related to how many levels and main characters or scenarios you want to develop. (A game doesn't have to have people in it) You may have more traditional animation storyboarding alongside structural diagrams, such as secondary event frames detailing dialogue, character meeting rules, or steps in a sequence.
Back in the 1930s Webb Smith, an animator at Walt Disney Studios, started drawing rough sketches of frames needed for his animation drawings on different bits of paper, then he stuck them up on a wall to communicate a sequence of events. If you are wanting to undertake some visual storytelling, whether for a sequence of drawings or paintings, animation, graphic novel or in this case a game, this is a vital tool. Even sculptors such as Robert Smithson used storyboards to work out how their work would be communicated, in the case of Robert Smithson he carefully plotted out how a film of his work 'Spiral Jetty' would be made. If he was working now I'm pretty sure he would have considered the implications of making a game based on his sculptural work.
Notebook ideas for a storyboard of 'Spiral Jetty': Robert Smithson
Movie Treatment storyboard for Spiral Jetty
WALL-E storyboards
I'm interested in the Andrew Stanton directed WALL-E, because there is very little verbal dialogue, the character communicating mostly in mime using hand signals, facial expressions and body language. Even if you are not interested in animation, you can learn a lot about how to deal with non verbal communication by watching how character interaction with inanimate objects can be used to emotional effect.
Wes Anderson is also an animation director who uses storyboarding to think with. He used the storyboard artist Jay Clarke for 'Isle of Dogs', asking Clarke to reference Akira Kurosawa films, for certain visual ideas such as silhouetted framing and dwarfing characters against a backdrop. If you look at the sequence below you can see how closely the storyboard artist has to work with an understanding of camera angle and the emotional impact of camera movement.
Storyboarding roughs, worked up images and final animation
The interaction of human beings with non human others, such as cameras, is also something that is not mentioned enough in books on art theory. As an artist I am aware that unless I am very sensitive to these issues my work will be very poor. The skills that arrive with that of empathy with other forms of being are vital to our survival and all of these skills are used in storyboarding for games.
Super Mario storyboard
Roller Rally storyboard concept
Design for a platform game
The art world has taken a while to accept that games can be developed as a fine art form, but over the last few years like photography and film making, video game design has become more and more accepted as an art form.
Video games as contemporary art
Artists like Alan Butler have involved themselves directly with existing video games, in his case with 'Grand Theft Auto' a game that has detailed sections of real streets as a background against which the gameplay takes place. His work Down and Out in Los Santos (2016-ongoing) is a series of photographs that are created by exploiting a smartphone camera feature within the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Players of GTAV can take photos within the game environment. This operates in basically the same way as ‘real’ cameras do. Butler walks around a simulated three-dimensional space, finds a subject, points the camera, composes the shot and shoots it; which means that Butler is the author of the imagery.
Alan Butler: Photograph taken from Grand Theft Auto
Alan Butler talks about his work
Why video games are art
There are particular games that stand out as being personal expression. Papa y Yo a game designed by Vander Caballero, is centred on a young Brazilian boy, Quico, who while hiding from his abusive, alcoholic father, finds himself taken to a dream-like favela, where he meets a strange creature. The player, as Quico, can interact with the creature and manipulate the buildings of the favela in order to complete puzzles and progress in the game.
Papa y Yo
Sam Barlow the designer of 'Telling Lies' describes it as a "desktop thriller", where the player becomes involved in a drama that is played out through stored video clips and other information presented on a virtual computer desktop. It provides the player with numerous video segments that in the game's narrative, cover a two-year period. Like Janet Cardiff's audio walk pieces such as 'The Missing Voice: Case Study B' from 1999, this game involves you in a complex unravelling of an event.
Sam Barlow storyboarding Telling Lies.
Scenes from 'Telling Lies'
Steve Gaynor, Karla Zimonja, and Johnnemann Nordhagen who are collectively known as 'The Fullbright Company', developed 'Gone Home' which is a game that puts the player in the role of a young woman returning from overseas to her rural family home to find the house empty, leaving her to piece together what has happened. The player has to explore the house and determine what has transpired by examining items, journals, and other items left around the various rooms. Very like Janet Cardiff's walking audio narratives, you build up a story in your mind as you invest time trying to follow what has happened. The story unfolds as you pick up scraps of paper, notes, letters, photos, cassette tapes and other bits and pieces littering the house, which effectively makes it an environmental piece but one with echoes of an artist's work such as Sophie Calle's 'Dumped by E mail'. Each piece of found text helping to build up a picture of what really happened. It is interesting that the game had to be set in 1995 because the designers considered it the most recent year in which technology had not made the majority of communication digital in nature. Perhaps that year will in the future be seen as a watershed year in relation to how society operates.
A scene from 'Gone Home'
The complexities of contemporary game design mean that it is done in teams but that doesn't as far as I'm concerned make it less of an art form.
An introduction to the complex world of a video game artist
I think we will have to readjust our idea of what an artist does in the future. This sort of technology requires, like a movie, a whole bunch of people with various skill sets and it is the result of a cooperative effort rather than individual genius. However well known artists are beginning to see how they can use video gaming to extend their existing practices. For instance KAWS (Brian Donnelly) has used an augmented reality artwork at the Serpentine Gallery
A visiter at the KAWS exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery
For one week at the beginning of 2022, 400 million existing 'Fortnite' video game followers could access a fully accurate replica of the Serpentine Gallery within the game, the artworks effectively becoming a game level that allowed a player to walk around with their avatar, and engage with the works.
Lawrence Lek, Nepenthe Zone (2021–ongoing)
In Lawrence Lek’s Nepenthe Valley (2022), the artist has created an installation inspired by the fictional medicine for memory in Greek mythology. Nepenthe Valley consists of an installation of virtual reality environments and was originally made for the virtual gallery AORA, something that is going to get more and more important, especially if Covid19 returns. The work revolves around nine “resting spots,” and it has virtual mountainous landscapes that come complete with meditation and breath-work sessions, infusing into the ethos of gaming a space for health and well-being.
LuYang
The Great Adventure of Material World, 2019, video game and video installation
In Lu Yang’s The Great Adventure of Material World (2019), players encounter a three-channel installation that, at first, appears like a typical role-playing game, with typical graphics, animations, quests, and battles. But players soon realise that the artist has changed the normal game narrative by forcing gamers to work with characters that shatter the illusion of the game’s narrative structure.
For those of you embarking on a fine art career, I think the status and relevance of art in relation to video gaming poses interesting questions as to the nature of art in the future. Many of you will play video games in your spare time, but how many of you have considered that video games could be the best art form to carry your ideas?
Most artists that want to get into working in this area begin by exploring game engines, which are the reusable components developers use to build the framework of games. By using an existing game engine you have more time to focus on the unique elements of your own idea, like character models, textures, how objects interact, etc. At the moment the Unity multi-platform game engine is free. It allows you to create interactive 3D content and I am told that a lot of indie developers use Unity for its ability to be used for pretty much any type of game. I'm also told it is very easy to master, but when I looked at it I found it a pretty steep learning curve, but that shouldn't put anyone off as I'm a pretty poor user of any software.
'Tableau Machine' created abstract images
Finally I'll leave you with an idea. 'Tableau Machine' was an AI based, interactive, visual art generator for shared living spaces. It was as its creators stated, 'an instance of...“alien presence”: an ambient, non-human, embodied, intelligent agent'. Overhead video cameras were placed in key places within someone's house, Tableau Machine interpreted its videoed environment by displaying a sequence of abstract images. At the core of the idea was an AI art generator with deep and long-term connections to its physical and social environment.
Tableau Machine at work: Notice the abstract pink image on the monitor over the fireplace.
It seems a long time ago when this was done, and AI technology has advanced a long way since then. Perhaps it is time for a return to the ideas behind the project, but to this time turn the technology around and to use the idea to make everyone aware of the ubiquitous presence of surveillance camera technologies. You don't need to install any new cameras, they are everywhere, what I would though like to do would be to use the thousands of cameras to generate footage that would be interpreted as abstract art. The audience would be all those thousands of security guards and others who are employed to daily watch over our lives and they would have to interpret the abstract images fed to them, in order to make decisions as to whether or not to take action in response to what was seen. A wishful vision but one that hopefully encourages you all to think about possible new uses for game technology in relation to the existing technological infrastructures that surround us. Perhaps a game that might save us from climate disaster, by getting us to redirect all our energies into saving the planet.
Coda
A recent review of the year's best video games by Lewis Gordon in ArtsReview, illustrates how far games have come as an art form and as carriers of ideas. Check out the review here.
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