THE GAME AWARDS 2020
This year The Game Awards went fully digital due to the global pandemic, so Geoff Keighley reached out for a series of short promotional animations designed for social media output. This year we focused on the idea of angels and their role as messengers from another realm of reality. Throughout the 3 pieces, we show The Game Awards Angel bringing coded messages to the viewers. Each piece is designed to feel as though the social media feed is glitching out and being intercepted by a new message. It was a huge learning experience working with the AI wizard Shmody to make some computer-assisted transformations.
Role: Design, Animation & Sound Design / Music
Client: The Game Awards
Created: 2020
The concept for this year revolved around The Game Award’s angel statue and how it transforms into a physical being. The first pass of imagery was created by filming the angel statue through several Lens Fractal Filters. Many motifs of angels in past artwork involve the ‘heavenly spheres’ so we felt it was appropriate to show the angel replicated in several rings throughout the sequence.
The Angel
Our visual progression focused on the Angel bringing a special digital message to the viewer that had to be decrypted. The message was shown in the form of hex codes, which we created by screen-capturing files opened through a hex editor called Hex-Fiend. We then processed that footage through the Tachyons+ Dreamweapon and filmed it on a 13” Sony CRT television.
Encrypted Message
Signal Interference
The final touch for these promos was to add a layer of glitch so that it felt as though the viewers social media feed was being taken over by a new signal. We rendered the entire video and then processed it through the Tachyons+ Dreamweapon module. After filming the video in 4 different styles, we combined them in Adobe After Effects to create the final look. We tried several different color combinations as shown above, but settled on the simple constructivist aesthetic of red, white and black.
Design & Animation: Peter Clark
AI Wizard: Cody Samson (Shmody)
Sound Design: Peter Clark (Enternull)
Glitch Hardware: Tachyons+