SXSW Gaming Awards 2015

2015 SXSW Gaming Awards

Opening Sequence / Role: Director

This project was the first in a 3 year long collaboration with SXSW Gaming. I was looking to create a piece that would tell the history of video games through abstract visuals and audio clues. Playing a sort of game with the audience, asking them to use their gaming experiences to connect the dots.

Behind the Scenes Montage

Inspiration

One of the key pieces of inspiration was the trend of modernist movie posters that use a simple graphic element to represent the movie. I figured we could do something similar but using movement and sound design.

A Christmas Story by Matt Owen / The Terminator by Unknown / Jurassic Park by Jamie Bolton

“Tiny Artists” generative art series by Rune Madsen

Design

Designs by Max Strizich

Animation

The sequence was animated in After Effects and Cinema 4D by myself, Sekani Solomon, Hayato Yamane, and Henry Chang. Our editor, Zach Kilroy, had done a very rough animatic to get an idea of overall timing for us to animate to, but we knew we would ultimately be filming everything off screens, which would give a lot of freedom in how the edit ultimately came together. Because of this, we were able to focus on animating a bunch of fun pieces without worrying how they would all fit together.

Screen Texture

Early in the process we came up with the idea of filming our animations off real screens from different eras to help represent the evolution of gaming. Starting with a black and white CRT, moving to a color CRT, and ultimately on an LCD panel. I bought a tiny portable black and white TV off eBay and our EP, Jon Hassel, brought in a color CRT from his parent's house.

It required a non trivial number of adapters to get the video signal from a modern computer to play on these old TVs, but once working, all the detail and luminous texture from a real screens added a unique look that we could never have achieved with an after effects plugin.