{"id":11772,"date":"2018-02-01T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/313885"},"modified":"2018-02-01T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T09:00:00","slug":"how-a-wes-anderson-movie-prop-maker-helped-develop-thats-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/02\/01\/how-a-wes-anderson-movie-prop-maker-helped-develop-thats-you\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Wes Anderson movie prop maker helped develop That’s You!"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you haven\u2019t played Wish Studios’\u00a0That\u2019s You!<\/em><\/a>, it might come as a surprise to learn that there\u2019s a strong link between this PS4 party game and the films of Wes Anderson.<\/p>\n

If you have, you\u2019ll know it captures some of Anderson\u2019s gentle surrealism, his eye for symmetry, use of color and his eye for graphic detail. Still, what\u2019s unexpected is that it comes as part of a Sony PlayLink<\/a> game.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In other words, it\u2019s designed to firmly locate the fun between the players in the room and\u00a0their connected smartphones, where\u00a0the game delivers the questions to them. The TV simply plays a supporting role, managing the game, collating scores and providing a soundtrack.<\/p>\n

And yet That\u2019s You!<\/em> also happens to feature incredibly lushly realized room settings, through which the camera lovingly pans and dollies while you answer quizzes and draw silly pictures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a good reason why: the devs\u00a0at Wish Studios were\u00a0anxious to relax players and get them\u00a0in the mood. The team realized early on in development that the game was at its best when players gave honest answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became funny when they\u2019re fallible, when you can poke fun at them,\u201d says art director Paul Abbott. \u201cThey needed to feel they were in a comfortable, recognizable, friendly environment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Making players feel at home<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Scenography was the solution. \u201cWe were thinking about places that people understand and feel comfortable in,\u201d Abbott says. And films like Napoleon Dynamite and those of Wes Anderson seemed to capture the familiarity he was after. \u201cThe way they dressed their sets, there\u2019s a lot of storytelling going on there, creating deep worlds through them. They feel like stage sets, illustrations of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
“There\u2019s a rule I try to work to, that if something was meant to be made by hand, I make it by hand. It\u2019s obvious when things like that are done digitally.”<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s You!<\/em> features 10 scenarios, including one set in a tent in the wilds of North America, a British seaside amusements pier, and a spooky attic. There\u2019s a South American jail, a scruffy German bar, a 1980s domestic kitchen and a school classroom. Devs may be curious to know that they were concepted by an illustrator rather than a traditional concept artist, because they were meant to be impressions of places rather than recreations, taken from the subjective memories of the character who provides the game\u2019s voiceover.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, an illustrator would tell a story more, I think,\u201d Abbott says. \u201cA concept artist would get across mood and form and lighting and that kind of thing, which the illustrator also did, but that wasn\u2019t the priority. The priority was illustrating a story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Intriguingly, realizing them meant hiring a graphic designer who had never worked in games before. Annie Atkins is best known for making props for film and TV, including Wes Anderson\u2019s Grand Budapest Hotel, for which she shared an Art Directors Guild award.<\/p>\n

In That\u2019s You!<\/em> she produced a wide array of props: notebooks, boxes, posters, tins, books, and also the thematically related tokens players use to boost their score. They bring life to spaces which feature very few living things, and no humans.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a whole new world for me, games,\u201d Atkins says, \u201cI\u2019d not considered them before, I guess because I never see references of graphic design in games, really.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when Abbott started to send her research for the scenarios Wish was planning, she realized they were designed to be inhabited by strongly drawn characters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201dThe fun thing about designing graphic props for film or games is that you\u2019re not really designing as a graphic designer a lot of the time. You have to step into the shoes of the character you\u2019re designing things for,” says Atkins.\u00a0“For example, in this game, if you have a prisoner in a cell in a South American jail, what\u2019s he going to doodle in his notebook? If you\u2019re a child in a horrible 1980s school, what do you carve into your desk? They\u2019re the fun things; they\u2019re really small details but they\u2019re so fun because you see the world through someone\u2019s eyes, and I think that\u2019s why we watch films and play games in the first place.”<\/p>\n

Atkins\u2019 process for working on That\u2019s You!<\/em> was quite different to working on a film. She\u2019d start a film project by going to the studio, taking the script and setting up a little office, from where she\u2019d exclusively work. She\u2019d go through the script and use it to identify what graphic props it demanded. And apart from designing them, she\u2019d also schedule their production according to the filming schedule, find and commission managing suppliers, from blacksmiths creating wrought iron gates to printed materials.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For That\u2019s You!<\/em>, much of the research was already complete, because it tends to happen much earlier in production than in film. Abbott passed to her sketches made by the concept illustrator and images of the research he and the team had done.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always the way when you start working with an artist that you have to feel where you stop as an art director,\u201d Abbott says. \u201cWhen it didn\u2019t work it was me giving Annie too much; it was best to let her get on with it with some ideas and reference material, and she comes up with something that surprises you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Atkins could therefore simply focus on making, spending more time on it than she\u2019d normally get. \u201cWe were able to push things until they were just right rather than go with things that weren\u2019t fully finished, which we do a lot of the time in film. Everything\u2019s always such a rush on a film set; it\u2019s such a high-pressure environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The objects she designed are remarkably credible, fitting right into their environments and helping them, in turn, feel real. And while her work for That\u2019s You!<\/em> would be realized in a digital medium, she still physically made a lot of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a rule I try to work to, that if something was meant to be made by hand, I make it by hand,\u201d Atkins says. She says that you can spend all day trying to recreate handwriting in Photoshop, but it\u2019s pointless if you can actually write by hand instead. The same goes for hand-lettering and signage, stencilling, or anything else you could do yourself.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201dIt\u2019s obvious when things like that are done digitally. Rubber stamps \u2013 get one made!” Atkins says. “They\u2019re so cheap and it\u2019s actually quicker in the long run than trying to make a rubber stamp look stampy.\u201d She also used the classic prop trick of tea-staining paper to make it look aged before writing on it.<\/p>\n

Wish then scanned them in on a normal consumer scanner at a high resolution, and traced over the details in Substance Painter to create the different material properties and a normal map for any of the details that were in relief, such as stitching on the player tokens.<\/p>\n

The value of sitting down with actual objects<\/strong><\/h2>\n

But beyond their making, they\u2019re designed credibly, too. Proportions of text look right, and so do their typefaces for the period they\u2019re meant to be representing. Atkins strongly believes that while Google Image Search is useful, it can\u2019t compare to sitting down with an actual object.<\/p>\n

\n
“You have to step into the shoes of the character you\u2019re designing things for…they\u2019re really small details but they\u2019re so fun because you see the world through someone\u2019s eyes, and I think that\u2019s why we watch films and play games in the first place.”<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIf you search for \u2019telegram\u2019 you\u2019ll find thousands of examples, but you can\u2019t judge their scale or the paper they\u2019re printed on,\u201d she says. She\u2019s gathered a large collection of what she calls \u2018paper ephemera\u2019, including telegrams form the 1940s, love letters from the 17th century, bus tickets, cigarette boxes, business letters. Otherwise worthless, they help her instantly know whether what she\u2019s designing looks authentic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI see typewritten documents written in a typewriter font in film and TV shows a lot, which is fine,\u201d she says. \u201cYou don\u2019t necessarily have to use a real typewriter all the time. But just make sure that you\u2019re not using 18 point font sizes, otherwise you wonder where they got this massive typewriter from! The audience isn\u2019t necessarily going to know something\u2019s wrong, but lots of little things add up.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not that she bounds herself to being slavishly realistic. Look closely at Thats You!<\/em>\u00a0and you’ll notice the\u00a0headlines on a 1950s Tunisian newspapers are in-jokes (in French), and there are Bigfoot references all over the place (it wanders into the background of the camping scenario, if you\u2019re paying attention). Atkins believes the best graphic prop is one which juxtaposes humour or a sense of character with authenticity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s when you first look and it seems realistic, and then you notice the words are lighthearted,” she says. “That\u2019s a nice combination. I guess Wes Anderson does that as well.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The result is a set of richly imagined spaces filled with subtle details. In the end, that\u2019s why Wish made the decision to design a camera that would go up close and linger over it all. \u201cWe realized we had all this lovely artwork and you couldn\u2019t really look at it,\u201d says Abbott.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you haven\u2019t played Wish Studios’\u00a0That\u2019s You!, it might come as a surprise to learn that there\u2019s a strong link between this PS4 party game and the films of Wes Anderson. If you have, you\u2019ll know it captures some of Anderson\u2019s gentle surrealism, his eye for symmetry, use of color and his eye for graphic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11773,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}