The Making of Disco Elysium - Part Four: Art

0:00 [ALEKSANDER ROSTOV] "Ah, the disco." People say weird stuff about it.

0:02 They say that it is about detective stuff,

0:06 or some people say that it's about politics,

0:10 Or some say it's about some deep internal turmoil, or the human condition.

0:15 I don't know what these people are talking about.

0:18 It is obvious that Disco Elysium is about painting.

0:24 (Spaghetti Western music) It has a little bit of everything in it.

0:30 It has portraiture, it has landscape.

0:32 It has metaphysical portraiture, the isometric of course,

0:36 the study of composition; these dialog framings,

0:39 when you're in conversations with characters are

0:42 often comic-bookish if you look at them.

0:44 Y'know, of light and shadow and of techniques like edge hierarchy,

0:47 where you obfuscate a line between one

0:50 shape and another to make the gradation smooth

0:53 and not pull your eye in, as a part of this complex composition of the image.

0:59 That is all in the game.

1:00 The game is a study about all of these things

1:03 and all of these techniques come together to make this game.

1:07 (Guitar strum rings out) [DANNY O'DWYWER] In these documentaries,

1:15 we often dive into the technical.

1:17 It's a somewhat inescapable byproduct of exploring

1:20 the work of pieces of software.

1:22 But today, in the fourth episode of our series on Disco Elysium,

1:25 we're gonna try our best to keep things Artistic.

1:28 Disco Elysium had a small art team by any standards.

1:31 A couple of artists, one animator, a 3D guy and a few other contributors.

1:35 But before we dive into their work I wanted to start with Aleksander Rostov,

1:39 as his painterly style was the visual fulcrum of this entire project.

1:44 What was the pathway through which he achieved the look of Disco Elysium,

1:47 and what practices and decisions led him down his particular artistic path?

1:55 [ALEKSANDER] You need to develop your taste,

1:57 and you need to look at a lot of art.

1:59 Once you see what is good, what is bad, you try to make it like the good guys

2:02 and you try to not make it like the bad guys.

2:05 Physical practice.

2:06 You can finally process it into a thing

2:09 and understand what it is that you were doing.

2:12 Trying out this art stuff autodidactically was just:

2:15 grind the anatomy until you remember it, and draw from memory until it looks

2:20 good enough and compare against the reference drawing.

2:24 All right, just keep painting the colors until they work (chuckles).

2:28 And then the internet as well.

2:30 I'm of the generation of the internet.

2:32 At first there was a little less information there.

2:35 Today there is...

2:36 You can get wonderful information on how to draw,

2:39 how painting works, what are the fundamental concepts of it.

2:42 "In my age, when I was a wee little lad,"

2:46 we only had "how to draw an anime face" tutorials.

2:48 And look and look at your anime faces now.

2:50 (Laughter) [DANNY] And look at your anime faces now!

2:54 Oh my god!

2:55 There was a critical moment in my youth, where I had to...

2:59 Now...

2:59 It's like "this is like a fork in the river

3:02 in the upstream." Does it drown this town, or does it flood this village?

3:09 Where does the river go?

3:10 "Do you choose the anime,

3:13 or do you choose the realism?" And I agonized over that decision!

3:17 But it did give me a kind of perspective on it– well,

3:21 later it came, a perspective on it.

3:22 That decision didn't really mean anything– that it's all the same thing,

3:25 and that you're simply learning different aspects of image craft.

3:29 Well, before me was, then...

3:32 Well, when I was very young,

3:33 was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the world,

3:37 and an apocalyptic event, in which the great endeavor collapsed in on itself,

3:42 and horrible things came out of it.

3:45 And maybe some nice things...

3:47 What the Soviet Union did,

3:49 was that it pumped a lot of money into cultural arts so the artists in the 60s

3:53 and 70s– the people who were translating

3:56 books– were like the intellectuals of the age,

3:58 so this literary quality was extremely high

4:01 and the works that they were writing and, y'know,

4:03 the artist could get a beautiful apartment on the top

4:06 of the building somewhere and it was a respected class.

4:10 And then with the '90s, the artist...

4:12 Suddenly it became derogatory, as an artist,

4:14 and so the prestige of the artist started declining, but this mysterious...

4:20 I don't know, some sort of an "aura" remained,

4:24 still like this Elven world of the arts,

4:27 that people just didn't know how to draw

4:30 like the old masters anymore like we've forgotten ancient,

4:34 secret knowledge impossible to reclaim.

4:37 Later, I thankfully found out that was wrong.

4:41 So, for me, growing up in this– like a ghost of arts being respected,

4:45 and then the state that it was in then...

4:48 The state that it was in, it was unacceptable.

4:51 I don't know.

4:52 The artist was reduced to running around after

4:54 getting grants and then backstabbing each other for €700,

4:58 so you can make your lousy little art thing that can be in the gallery,

5:04 that you barely have any time to conceptualize, or think through,

5:07 or make into something wondrous and big like art needs to be.

5:10 And so all the art you see is mediocre and miserable,

5:12 and the artists are mediocre and miserable

5:15 and the world is mediocre and miserable.

5:17 In the '90s and early 2000s.

5:21 So it makes one very critical towards that and towards the art institutions.

5:25 Art must be done outside of institutions.

5:40 (Greeting noises) [DANNY] Nice to meet you!

5:49 (Laughter) [ALEKSANDER] Hello!

5:53 [HELEN HINDPERE] Oh my God!

5:55 What happened?

5:55 [DANNY] What's Doggy's name?

5:57 [ALEKSANDER] Pushti.

5:58 [DANNY] Pushti?

5:59 [ALEKSANDER] Pushti.

6:00 [DANNY] Pushti!

6:00 [HELEN] Yeah.

6:01 [DANNY] Hello Pushti!

6:02 [ALEKSANDER] This is the neighborhood.

6:04 This is where I grew up.

6:05 This is the Soviet dreams.

6:07 You have the panel houses,

6:08 you have the kindergartens and schools in between the panel houses.

6:11 The panel houses are like fortress walls around, protecting the children.

6:15 Much like the children's creche in Alpha Centauri.

6:18 The best of the civilization games.

6:20 Then you have this forest here.

6:23 There's horses there,

6:25 that just ride around because the hippodrome is over there.

6:27 And then if you follow this...

6:29 wooded road down, then you get to the Stroomi Beach.

6:33 Which is what the Martinaise Beach is sort of modeled on.

6:38 The sad, autumnal version of it.

6:40 If you go there today, you will see the happy summer version of it (chuckles).

6:43 [DANNY] What's it like in the winter?

6:46 [ALEKSANDER] Oh, it's dreadful!

6:47 Sometimes it ices over,

6:48 and there's just this line of ice that goes into the horizon.

6:52 But other times, if you get temperature fluctuations happening,

6:54 you get this cool thing where the sheets of ice, they come on top of each other,

6:59 and it's like shark teeth coming out of the water at you.

7:02 That's very fun.

7:03 But it happens quite rarely.

7:05 The garage is the most important building

7:07 for a child growing up in Eastern Europe.

7:10 Because behind the garage is where The Dominion of the Child lies...

7:14 Where the eyes of The Parent do not reach.

7:16 So, behind the garage is where you keep...

7:19 Well, where you burn the matches of course.

7:21 I might have caused...

7:22 a couple of wildfires here in my youth (chuckles uneasily) It is also,

7:27 of course, where you keep the porno mags,

7:29 with the other children, that you find on the roof of the garage,

7:32 so any adults walking dogs back there don't see them.

7:36 And here they're gonna build a tramway.

7:38 But this just used to be a wasteland.

7:41 A wonderful wasteland.

7:44 [DANNY] Did you find porno mags in The Wasteland?

7:46 We used to find them in the woods.

7:48 [ALEKSANDER] Yeah.

7:48 [DANNY] Sorry I'm asking so much about porn mags.

7:49 [ALEKSANDER] Yeah, I don't know.

7:51 The porn mags are very important for the children.

7:53 It's where you learn the female form for the artist, you see?

7:57 And it's also this secret for children to bind or bond over.

8:01 [HELEN] Great loot.

8:02 [ALEKSANDER] Great loot!

8:02 [HELEN] Looting them from the wasteland.

8:04 This was our Wasteland, too.

8:06 (Laughs) [ALEKSANDER] What's going on, Siim?

8:16 [SIIM RAIDMA] Mmm.

8:18 [ALEKSANDER] Mmm?

8:20 He's doing something with code...

8:24 Why are you sitting in my seat?

8:26 That's where I sit.

8:28 So the art team was quite cozy.

8:31 It was me, Siim Raidma, who I already mentioned,

8:35 who was doing the technical stuff.

8:37 Kaspar Tamsalu, who was doing location concept art.

8:41 He has a wonderful sense for domestic compositions.

8:45 Quite a few of the dialogue frames are also sort of designed by him,

8:49 because he's a comic book artist by heart.

8:52 When you meet Everart Claire, you have these...

8:55 In the image, you will see that the container frames (clicks) put Everart here,

8:59 and you're here and you're lined in between these frames and all of this stuff.

9:04 Yeah, Kaspar designed those locations.

9:08 Rauno Somelar, who was our 3D heavy-canon.

9:13 He was...

9:14 He knew how to do 3D.

9:16 Nobody else knew how to do 3D.

9:19 Young Markus Härma was our junior artist.

9:23 It's hard to sort of pinpoint down what he did.

9:25 He helped out with a lot of stuff, and in the end just...

9:29 It's a little bit all over the place.

9:31 He did the loading screens, for instance,

9:33 that's an image that he did, and modeled a bunch of stuff.

9:37 On the character side,

9:39 we had a wonderful Eastern European caricature, Pavel Kuba.

9:44 We called him "Pasha".

9:46 So he came...

9:46 He came on quite late.

9:47 He sculpted some of the characters.

9:50 He sculpted the Armors and Everart Claire and Morell,

9:54 some of these more involved characters.

9:56 There's Eduardo Rubio, who was the animator.

9:59 He basically animated the entire thing.

10:02 [ARGO TUULIK] Eduardo, I think, came on board around the time I came on board.

10:06 He was there from the beginning and he was there all the way.

10:10 Like, I have nothing but positive things to say about working with Eduardo.

10:15 A wonderful, wonderful person.

10:16 Such a distinct and unique animation style as well.

10:20 It kind of takes this character model art style of Disco

10:28 and it puts a little bit of cartooniness on top of it.

10:30 But exactly this right amount of cartooniness.

10:35 Anything more, and it might actually feel a little childish.

10:38 But anything less, and it would just not have that charm.

10:41 [SIIM] We went for Unity and Blender because that's the tools I knew.

10:47 And the privilege of coming in early is that we're going to use this and this.

10:52 And anyone else we're going to hire is going

10:55 to either deal with it or not join us.

10:57 Which is great, because Blender is really scriptable,

11:00 and something even I could build a pipeline out of.

11:04 So it starts with either a sketch of the level– like

11:10 the interior or the exterior– or just a block-out inside Blender.

11:16 Then we flesh it out,

11:18 but not too much because most of the details will be painted in.

11:22 In Blender, we get to a point where it's mostly color blocked.

11:27 And enough details are there so that objects have their silhouettes,

11:32 which we do need for the height maps and rendering.

11:35 Blender will render out colors, normal maps,

11:38 like the surface normals for the whole map.

11:41 Absolute height, which is a trick we got from the Pillars of Eternity video.

11:46 Then we have a clown map, which is like a different color for each object,

11:49 which helps with the painting over and masking in Photoshop.

11:56 Rostov would grab the color map and just paint over it.

12:00 I got my first Wacom Cintiq.

12:04 "Oh my God, this is the happiest day of my life!" This giant screen

12:09 that I can draw on all day for the next five/six/seven years of my life!

12:13 Oh my God, I was so happy.

12:15 A big distinction in the performance of art

12:19 is whether you are drawing from the wrist, doing little sketchbook drawings.

12:24 This gives you this curvature of the wrist

12:26 or whether you are doing it from the shoulder,

12:28 which gives you this absolute control to do straight lines, or anything.

12:33 From the internet, I learned that they teach you to use your shoulder to draw,

12:37 that this is the superior, more controlled way to do it.

12:41 And with the Cintiq, you can really do it.

12:44 It's big enough.

12:45 You're drawing to imitate painting in the small,

12:49 but on the big, you can kind of paint.

12:51 You can like do these strokes and (whoosh).

12:52 The isometric image is wonderful, in that it is flat.

12:56 There is none of this 3D, a million viewpoints.

12:59 It's just this one image.

13:00 So in essence, you can design the entire game as if it was like a painting.

13:05 And that's kind of what we did.

13:07 It's also the cutest image.

13:09 It's this...

13:09 It's the image of children playing with toys.

13:12 It's just like a childhood wonder of the toy house,

13:15 and moving little guys around, and so on.

13:17 That's why the isometric thing basically just works so well.

13:21 You just plug the painterly knowledge into it,

13:24 and you simply make a better isometric image.

13:28 Because painting is all about the study of the image and how to guide the eye,

13:34 and make this part of the image clean,

13:36 and this part of the image very textured and active and complex,

13:39 to pull your eye here.

13:40 And then design these motion lines through

13:43 the image to draw the eye of the viewer.

13:47 Well, of course, a complex problem then,

13:49 is if you paint this background with all of these brush strokes,

13:52 and then you have these 3D models that you want there to move around,

13:56 because it's so complicated to do...

13:58 2D animate them.

13:59 And then you have this challenge of, "Oh my God,

14:03 how do you take this Blinn-Phong-shaded rounded,

14:05 bulbous 3D form, and how do you integrate

14:10 it into the painterly sensibilities of the image?" So,

14:14 if you know about normal maps,

14:17 a normal map takes a 3D surface and then maps an image on it,

14:22 which says that this point is actually looking that way.

14:25 So you can do this small detail stuff.

14:28 It's standard video game techniques,

14:30 but what is not very standard is what we try to do,

14:33 is that we try to hand-paint them!

14:35 And that is like, oy oy oy, mind arithmetic...

14:39 And in the end, we discovered that you can just kind

14:43 of sculpt it like this, that you just do this planar simplification.

14:47 It's like...

14:48 Soviet monuments often have this (booming sounds) happening.

14:53 The magical Siim Raidma.

14:56 He's just like...

14:57 He's the coder, which basically...

14:59 He made the pixel math and he made the screen do the thing that it needed to do.

15:05 I don't know, this goal would've been impossible without him, basically.

15:10 [SIIM] So the interesting stuff, which is...

15:12 we made up on the go, which was a shadow map, which we had...

15:17 We rendered three directions of shadows, which is the morning, noon and evening.

15:21 And it was interesting to get the angle just right because the whole game

15:27 will have the same direction of sunlight in the morning and in the evening.

15:32 [ALEKSANDER] Basically,

15:32 three times of day with their own lights and the night time,

15:35 which is sort of like without, I guess, shadows in that sense.

15:39 But this shadow information is multiplied over the main like painting.

15:44 So it's just this one painting and then the shadow does like all the...

15:47 [SIIM] And at the last moment we decided, for the noon shadows,

15:52 the sun was going basically from above the camera.

15:56 At the last moment, before rendering out most of the stuff,

15:59 Rostov decided to put the sun on the other side of the map,

16:06 which means all of the ground is still light,

16:10 but all of the buildings are now in shadow, dark.

16:14 So that increased contrast.

16:16 So it was really flat before.

16:18 And that decision made the noon shadows a lot better.

16:22 So this...

16:23 It's three directions because we had like three channels in a PNG, right?

16:28 So RGB will be the three direction of the sun.

16:32 [ALEKSANDER] And the occlusion, he reverse-engineered the depth map thing.

16:39 So that the world is just a flat image, but it has rendered out a height map.

16:44 So that it knows if your character is

16:47 standing behind something or out in front of something,

16:49 Some trigonometric calculations are being done for each

16:52 pixel to like occlude and do stuff like that.

16:54 There's a lot of little shader effect stuff happening there.

16:57 If you walk around the world, for instance, we have a remnant of fog of war.

17:04 But we didn't end up using it in a sort of a traditional way.

17:09 It sort of serves as a, what do you call it?

17:13 vignette in photography, just a vignette around it.

17:15 But because the world is so painterly and such a textured thing,

17:19 then it doesn't work if you just have a gradient on the edge.

17:22 It like makes the image cheaper.

17:24 So instead, the fog of war, this darkness of the image,

17:29 it almost (hisses) snakes through the image.

17:31 Because, what it does is,

17:33 it goes first from the lighter parts and remains longer in the darker.

17:37 So it's like if you're walking along this tiled floor,

17:41 Martinaise ground there, then you will see that this fog at the edges,

17:45 it's (hisses) just snaking away into the cracks

17:48 of between the tiles and the tiles come gleaming out.

17:51 And it's like super subtle, but it adds so much to the liveliness of the image.

17:56 'Cos there was a big problem, in general,

17:58 that the painting is so still, how do you bring it to life?

18:02 Yeah, that was a big problem.

18:04 We just, over the years, developed some...

18:06 There's some obvious things, put a little rotating fan in a room and you

18:10 put these 3D assets that are like doing some stuff somewhere.

18:12 The characters are doing their little like idle loops and stuff.

18:16 Little things like trees are lying about perspective.

18:20 The tops of trees are slightly doing a parallax,

18:23 and then it fades out to the root.

18:26 So just as you're walking, the trees are like slightly just sliding.

18:29 Other things, when you walk, for instance,

18:32 when you go into the courtyard behind the Whirling-in-Rags,

18:36 you will see that the houses that are

18:39 in the foreground [high] up, they get shadowed.

18:42 So it gives you depth perception to the image as well.

18:44 The courtyard is normal color,

18:46 but it calculates this trigonometry that this is closer

18:49 to the camera and it sort of turns it into a silhouette.

18:53 It makes the image more readable.

18:55 Because part of this isometric image is

18:57 also that everything is of the same importance.

18:59 You can't quite...

19:00 You lose one of these tools of like control over it.

19:03 But then with that, we've got to get it back.

19:05 And it also just makes the image change as you're moving.

19:07 It adds a little bit of this life in there.

19:09 I don't know, simmering light beams that are just planes with like

19:12 an animated texture on it and little bugs somewhere flying around, I think.

19:17 But the compositions are mostly in the dialog compositions.

19:21 For the mouse, you just click on the character and then

19:24 your guy walks into a predefined position that looks good.

19:27 They're talking to each other,

19:29 which is kind of annoying when you're gamepad controlling.

19:32 You're up to the character, talk to him,

19:34 but the other guy needs to (clicks) move a little.

19:36 I don't know how to design around it,

19:38 'cos it's kind of important for the composition and the psychology

19:41 of how the two characters are communicating with each other,

19:45 that they are in these specially designed locations.

19:47 And then it goes into this image composition and so on.

19:51 It was quite the effort to figure out how to paint this giant painting,

19:54 'cos you can only have so many pixels in one

19:57 Photoshop file before the computer runs out of RAM.

20:00 Which is a constant problem.

20:02 RAM, my eternal enemy.

20:04 In Photoshop, you can link images into other images.

20:08 So the mega massive painting of the world is basically a bunch

20:15 of Photoshop images that are these tiles that have been (slotting noise).

20:20 Here's the tiles of the...

20:23 behind the Whirling-in-Rags courtyard.

20:26 And this edge overlaps with the...

20:28 what is at the Doomed Commercial Area.

20:30 The outside area, the bookstore and stuff.

20:33 And then you paint this image and you paint

20:36 this image and then you carefully paint what's in between,

20:39 thinking exactly which surface should be considered

20:43 "the master," the overriding truth of of which one.

20:47 And then you just stitch these Photoshop files together into a giant,

20:52 giant, giant painting.

20:53 [SIIM] So we have a lot of pixels in the game, right?

20:56 So the exterior of Martinaise is like...

21:00 I found the number, quoting myself,

21:03 is like 10 gigapixels of texture information.

21:07 It's a lot of pixels, and we wanna make it work without loading screens.

21:12 Virtual texturing came to mind, which was...

21:15 id Software's Rage, in 2011 I think, did the megatextures thing.

21:21 It was quite big at one point.

21:25 Being arrogant and ambitious...

21:26 "Sure, why not?

21:27 Let's do this instead of loading screens." It's a miracle that it worked out.

21:32 But Unity was at a weird spot at this exact moment where they had...

21:38 I think they had bought a company that did virtual texturing,

21:41 but they hadn't done anything with it.

21:43 It's...

21:44 At this point, it wasn't the pattern for Unity yet.

21:47 So it was, that was unavailable to us.

21:50 And the only other competitor with virtual texturing was Amplify Texture 2.

21:56 It was a bit of a gamble, because it wasn't ported to the console yet.

22:00 But luckily enough, they were like super responsive.

22:03 We just started using it and asking dumb questions.

22:07 They kept answering them to the point where

22:10 they just sent the whole source for the plugin.

22:13 So fast forward, Amplify Creations ended up being ZA/UM Porter,

22:19 which is part of the studio.

22:26 [DANNY] So much of the soul of Disco

22:28 Elysium comes through the various character portraits.

22:30 Like much of the art in the game, while Rostov was the primary vision holder,

22:34 there were collaborations between art, writers, and design.

22:37 Doing more than just showing the face of the person or skill you're

22:40 talking to, but giving subtle visual insight

22:42 into their own place within the story.

22:45 So what was the process through which these iconic images were created?

22:49 [ROSTOV] For every portrait artist, there is the hero portraitist.

22:53 And for a lot of them it is of course the Velázquez.

22:57 The original psychological portraitist.

23:02 And there, you look at his portrait of that Pope Innocent X.

23:08 Not so innocent.

23:10 But the look in the eyes and...

23:12 It reveals something.

23:14 It is not simply a flattering picture of some guy,

23:16 but you can also tell that that guy is a bit of an asshole.

23:20 That is the minimum accepted quality.

23:22 The portrait needs to be as good as Velázquez (laughs).

23:26 So there needs to be something in there,

23:28 it just can't be a picture of a pretty person.

23:31 But I don't know, this is sort of just like intuitive stuff.

23:33 You, I don't know, try to read yourself into the character.

23:36 Which is fortunately quite easy,

23:38 because the writers are very good at making them into proper characters.

23:42 Someone who you can read into and really

23:46 picture a depth of emotional world behind those words.

23:50 And eventually the image.

23:52 Ah!

23:52 yes, of course: Symbolism.

23:55 Shapes and images and things.

23:56 They all mean stuff and they do stuff.

23:59 Well, what we do is, we take in the external world.

24:03 The external world is so big!

24:05 But if you put the frame around it,

24:08 it becomes this image that you can comprehend.

24:10 It's like this "framing of the image," I call this event.

24:13 The portrait is this framed image.

24:15 But it is still basically sending in this direct,

24:18 strong, raw signal into your head.

24:20 And different shapes, they have different effects on us.

24:23 Y'know, a circle is round and somehow warm and welcome, 'cos goes on forever.

24:27 There's like other aspects to it.

24:29 But it's like, for the character of Kim, that is the sort of round, solid...

24:36 Is not falling apart.

24:37 Does not have weaknesses in the corners or structural issues or...

24:42 So you just feel this.

24:44 It just communicates with your spine, somehow.

24:47 While Jean has the rectangle and the stuff.

24:49 And it keeps us straight-back and shit together.

24:54 But also it's kind of rotten and black.

24:56 And it's kind of scribbled in, a little (growls).

24:58 And it's also black because of depression, and the color of black.

25:02 And all of these sort of, when you sort of say them out loud,

25:07 are very banal things to point out.

25:09 But when you don't mention it and they're just in the image,

25:12 they just do what I said.

25:14 And you just layer these different effects upon you.

25:17 And eventually it's just,

25:18 there's so many of these effects that you layer upon each other.

25:21 That it just does stuff to you.

25:23 It's like when you look at the Rothko's paintings.

25:26 If you look at them like online, on a computer screen, Mark Rothko.

25:30 It's like...

25:32 He just made a canvas, right?

25:36 But when you like see it in real life

25:37 and you stand in front of it and the uninterrupted, unisolated,

25:40 pure signal enters your eye (gasps) so that you're transfixed around

25:46 it and you understand the strength of what is happening there.

25:50 Very subtle, very easy to make fun of, as well.

25:53 But also incredibly powerful.

25:54 And then, I don't know, then there's the semantic symbolist layer,

25:59 that's sort of above it or together with it,

26:02 with Ikon painting, the halo, the nimbus and so on.

26:07 So all of these things are just...

26:09 Whenever you go in to make one of those portraits,

26:12 you're just trying to feel out like what is a kind of an appropriate trick,

26:18 technique, a curveball that you can put into this image

26:22 to manipulate the player into feeling an emotion.

26:27 And in a way, the entire art style of the game

26:30 is sort of this; is a study into subjectivity.

26:33 When a painting differs from the natural, Real of it,

26:39 one can ask a question: Why does it differ?

26:44 And if you're careful about it, then each of these why's can...

26:48 You can say something with it.

26:49 It's the space that you can put meaning into an image.

26:54 The entire game is a little bit like that.

26:57 But the portraits are like a small, focused study of that.

27:01 A lot of the obvious effects have been sleuthed out by the fans.

27:05 They now point out that Kuno is in the same pose as Half-Light.

27:09 Sort of like embodying that like fight-or-flight response.

27:13 But otherwise Kuno is fairly naturalistically painted.

27:17 Like, it's this child that's in front of you.

27:19 So the symbolism, it's less to do with that.

27:22 These abstract things, it's just a pose.

27:24 It's like really embodying that character.

27:26 Measurehead is a little bit boring.

27:28 He's just trying not to look mega black.

27:30 So just, so it would be...

27:32 The joke would be a little bit more sophisticated than "ha-ha, black racist".

27:36 And it's also a little bit like, all the colors are there.

27:39 So it's, you know, universalizing him a little bit.

27:42 The Klaasje and Sylvie portraits.

27:46 It's interesting to compare the two actually, yes.

27:49 Sylvie is painted in a kind of a naturalism.

27:51 It's just a girl that you talk to, who

27:55 does not pretend to harbor great mysteries behind her.

28:00 Lives a decent life.

28:03 While of course, Klaasje is just all shadow behind the fringe, the bangs.

28:09 Yes.

28:10 Klaasje was also one of the first portraits that I did.

28:12 So it's a little bit more true

28:15 to the original structure that I devised for the portraits.

28:18 So one of these tasks of, "Oh my God,

28:20 can I make this game and have to paint so many

28:23 portraits?" is to figure out how do you do the portraits.

28:25 What kind of techniques do you use to do it with optimal time,

28:29 while also giving you all of these tools of symbolic expression.

28:33 It was constructed out of these flat layers with less rendering time.

28:38 almost like posterized sort of feel with dark blacks,

28:42 kind of like a modernist technique, to use like black lines and stuff in there.

28:46 And Klaasje was one of the early ones.

28:48 So she really exemplifies this approach of simplified flat shapes.

28:54 Later portraits can get more complex as I

28:57 get more comfortable working in the style.

28:59 But yeah, these are two people who are

29:01 trying to communicate different things about themselves to you.

29:03 So you perceive them differently.

29:05 All the paintings are the perception of the Mr.

29:09 Dubois.

29:09 Are all the Mr.

29:11 Dubois' perception of the other.

29:13 So for instance, the twin kids who are painted, Lilienne's twins,

29:16 they're just the same image flipped,

29:19 which is a wonderfully cheap production trick.

29:22 But also really does reflect the understanding

29:25 that like a drunkard middle-aged man has...

29:27 "This child is like a flipped copy

29:30 of that child!" (laughter) [DANNY] What about Mr.

29:33 Dubois himself then?

29:34 'Cos he gets a number of different expressions.

29:37 And "The Expression", of course.

29:38 Ah yes, The Expression.

29:39 The Expression had to be painted many times to find the exact nuance.

29:42 I'm very glad that they repainted the mirror

29:45 painting at the nick of time before release.

29:48 But yes, Mr.

29:51 Dubois, Mr.

29:53 Dubois's visage also keeps changing across every single image of him.

29:58 One of the reasons is that, you see,

30:01 I am an amateur autodidact and I never learned how to draw the same face twice.

30:06 And then, too, it's also...

30:08 No, actually, no, no, forget I said that.

30:11 It's, y'know, "his self-image.

30:14 Sometimes he thinks he's handsome,

30:17 sometimes less so." Y'know, it's all about that...?

30:22 (Chuckles) But yes, well, the cool trick is that the first

30:25 painting is this Francis Bacon-like mystery man,

30:28 who even is this, you only see the soreness of his nose there or something.

30:31 It's red a little bit.

30:33 And then you get to change the portrait, really.

30:37 And it's just, also, every time a game does something on the UI,

30:42 that it changes a UI element or...

30:45 I don't know, it's postmodern game design.

30:47 It's sort of a game design rule, or a game event that happens outside,

30:53 the usual event space where stuff happens in the game,

31:00 that's just juicy, juicy art school shit.

31:04 (Laughter) Same thing when you go talk to the light-bending guy,

31:10 then the net worth (whirring) your money goes like crazy.

31:13 And then, I think you can get the net

31:16 worth counter on your user interface and so on.

31:18 I'm a big proponent of that type of game design.

31:22 I must admit, I might have learned that from Mr.

31:26 Kojima.

31:30 [DANNY] And so ends the fourth episode in our series.

31:32 In the next episode,

31:33 we wander into the programmers' room and then follow the team

31:36 as they split apart from their home base in Tallinn,

31:39 in the months leading up to launch.

31:41 This period of time was the most tumultuous for the team,

31:44 and planted seeds for difficult times many

31:46 of the development team would have over the coming years.

31:49 If you'd like to watch that episode right now,

31:52 you can do so over on our Patreon.

31:53 Our work is entirely funded by people

31:55 who care about telling the stories behind games.

31:57 So we really appreciate all the folks who have

32:00 contributed to our Patreon over the course of this season.

32:03 We simply couldn't do this work without you.

32:09 [ALEKSANDER] Whether you draw with a pencil

32:12 or whether you paint with a paintbrush

32:14 and some wonderfully smelly natural medium with potentially

32:21 toxic chemicals or whether you do it digitally,

32:24 in the end you're doing the same thing.

32:26 And whether you are doing anime or realism, you're doing the same thing.

32:30 In essence, there is this total truth

32:33 of the image that you are trying to construct,

32:37 an expression of an individual image.

32:41 And any tool and any technique,

32:45 any stylistic approach that you use is sort of equivalent in it.

32:52 Fundamentally, you're always thinking the same

32:55 sort of thoughts about what shape,

32:57 value and color should be next to what other shape.

33:00 How does it make you feel?

33:02 What are the cultural symbolic implications of those things?

33:06 So there is a great equivalence to all of them.

33:09 But it is also, of course,

33:11 a great superpower if you have managed to build up competency in all of them.

33:16 'Cos there are tricks that are more easily discovered

33:20 in one medium that you can then translate to another.

33:25 Oil painting teaches you a certain thing which

33:27 you can then try to recreate in digital.

33:29 Digital teaches you other things which you then try to recreate in oil.

33:33 It's this back and forth.

33:36 I'm glad that I got to do a little bit of everything.

33:38 It really like taught me a lot about it.

33:45 (Ident clicks) (Click)