In Game Cutscenes

When we were asked to find our favorite in-game cut scene the first one that came into my head was this one, a scene from upcoming game, Bioshock Infinite. The game focuses on your character, Booker DeWitt, as he tries to rescue female character, Elizabeth from her sky prison.

The three characters that we see in this cut scene are Booker (first person character cam), Elizabeth and her towering steam-punk guardian, Songbird. The reason why I love this scene is because as  Songbird is about to crush Booker into a fine dust, Elizabeth calls out to it, making its fist stop just before reaching Booker. It then attempts to hit him again but is once again stopped by Elizabeth who  grabs his hand and tells him to take her home and that she is sorry for leaving. I find it comical when she first apologies to songbird who in response turns his head away in a sulky manner, telling her off without saying anything. His portholes are also yellow at this point, showing that he doesn't believe what his female prisoner has to say for herself.

Even though Songbird is the main antagonist of this upcoming game he is by far my favorite character as he shows blatant emotions towards Elizabeth, an example of this is after she tells him to take her home and his eye portholes glow green again, showing that he is neutral and happy to fulfill her request and attempts to do no further harm to Booker.
The way that all 3 interact seems like somewhat of a love triangle to me, as Booker is supposed to build a close relationship with Elizabeth who loves Songbird but wants to be free to go where ever she wants. Songbird on the other hand behaves as somewhat of an abusive husband. Not letting his precious beautiful woman out of her tower and instead getting things for her rather than having her go get them herself , (in Songbirds case he brings books to Elizabeth).

It isn't only the short story we can build between these three that makes this my favorite in-game cut scene, the way that the scene flows makes it look smooth and beautiful, not sparing much detail on the features of Songbirds mechanical form nor the fairness of Elizabeth's face. I also love the sound engineering in this scene and adore the sounds that Songbird makes as he sounds like a clockwork sea creature, perhaps a whale or dolphin as they make high squeal and clicking noises when talking to each other.

I cannot wait to play Bioshock Infinite can see more of the in game cut scenes containing all three main characters as I'd love to see more of how they all interact.

Summer Hollidays

Over the course of the summer holidays my main focus has gone towards improving my skills on Photoshop. I've been doing this in a number of ways, reading digital art magazines, books, watching online tutorials, talking to other concept artists and just in general developing my own ways of creating art that are more unique to me. Not to mention some other big changes in my personal life, a big one being moving into my own flat over in the iQ student accommodation. Although I miss the comforts of home sometimes being given the freedom of being able to be stay up to stupid o' clock in the hours of the morning on my art all the while playing music has proven to be really useful to me as I don't feel like I'm limiting times that I'm usually at my most creative.

However it hasnt been easy finding good tutorials to use as foundations for improving my art as its become quite easy to see that a vast majority of professional concept artists keep their methods of how they do their art secret and seem very reluctant to really want to give anything major away, mainly in the topics of brushes, textures and blending methods.
That said, after a good week of flat out concept art research I found one website which proved incredibly useful to me made by a retired games concept artist nicknamed "IDrawGirls."

IDrawGirls has done hundreds of different styles of concept art, ranging from environment, mech, weapons, games, humans and beasts. Each of his videos has their own tutorials, (some free others not) that give detailed explanations of how he gets to his end result.
The reason behind why I love his website so much is that the tutorials are relatively cheap and some are over 3 hours long each with a step by step run through of what brushes, opacity, textures and exercises to use when creating the art.

Along side concentrating on developing my concept art I've also been doing some refresher work in Maya, designing environment assets and generally making sure my 3D modelling skills don't get too rusty. I have also finished my preparations for this years Leeds Thought Bubble event where I will be attending the event as Batman villain Harley Quinn. I will be making sure to make a solid portfolio for this event so that any work I can bring along with me can be critiqued and given opinions from the professionals and hopefully make new connections.