A behind the scenes look at the development of a creepy puzzle game.
The (new) Official Launch Trailer!
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A new Hauntibles trailer has launched! This short film took a long while to make as it involved sourcing and dressing the set with antiques, lighting them to simulate the glow of vintage Edison bulbs, using my home-made dolly to get smooth shots, and then editing the footage down to roughly a minute. Phew!
I'm very happy with how it turned out, and feel it better reflects the vintage mood of the game. Thanks to @papersofthepast for lending me the scrapbooks and @orchestralis for their perfectly ethereal music.
Over the years, I've directed a number of historical documentaries for television. This required a large amount of research at the the Library of Congress & National Archives. It was here, among faded photographs and dusty card catalogues, that I first discovered the creepy imagery that would inspire the game HAUNTIBLES. Early photos such as Civil War daguerreotypes break down over time. The figures captured in them now appear rather ghostly. My mind wandered as I searched through the old images. What were the people in these photos like? What stories could they tell us? How might they communicate from beyond the frame? The idea for HAUNTIBLES began to materialize. Many collections are digitized, but not everything's online. Sometimes, it's nice to take a stroll through the card catalogues and see what you find. Spooky old photos did more than just inspire the game HAUNTIBLES. Many ended up in the game itself. I incorporated these images direc...
Early animation test of one the specters in HAUNTIBLES. Ghost have been depicted countless ways in movies, TV, and games. They run the gambit from fully formed Ghostbusters ghouls to the more ethereal forms of Paranormal Activity. HAUNTIBLES contains a number of spirits, some helpful - others malevolent. The question is, what form should they take? While I'm still ironing out the look, I'm drawn to the use of flowing cloth. The floating garments really sell the idea that these beings exist in another realm, with different rules governing the physics. I also like Victorian-era outfits, especially the creepy "mourning gowns" customarily worn at the time. 1861 photo showing the five daughters of Prince Albert mourning his death. After his passing, Queen Victoria wore mourning clothing for the rest of her life. Ghosts are such a staple of our storytelling, and have been featured so many times, that it's difficult to come up with an original look an...
Closeup of my old BOLEX camera showing the framerate dial and part of the handcrank. My film class was one of the last to shoot, edit, and project our movies using actual film stock. Nowadays they shoot everything digital (and in many ways it's much better.) Florida mosquitoes would attack me whenever my hands were stuck inside a change bag; sometimes the lab would screw up the negatives; and we'd never knew for sure if we'd exposed our scenes properly until days later. Filming a shipwreck movie on the Gulf Coast back in college. But there was still something magical about holding a reel in your hands, a frozen waterfall of time condensed into miniature rectangles. Although threading celluloid through Steenbeck edit tables was tricky, it also felt like we were practicing a trade, an ancient craft passed down to us from the legends of movie-making (or maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic.) I wanted to capture some of that old-fashioned mojo in HAUNTIB...
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