Are you more into the retro platformers or new indie-games, the neo-retro platformers. Or both equally? Your work reminds more of the new ones. And does your inspiration to do this work come more from animation or video gaming?
The main idea for Death Maze Challenge comes from stick figure death mazes. You can find tons of them on YouTube. I only wanted to give them human expression. They’re fancy stick figures with a bit of character, who don’t just fall into a trap, but feel miserable about falling into a trap. And don’t just move from A to B but are happy or excited or unsure or afraid to go from A to B. The inspiration comes just as much from film and animation as it comes from games.
Your idea is fresh and interesting way to explore the medium. It’s also a great example of new kind of influences and way of thinking and possibly story telling in contemporary animation. Traditional animated film makers have been looking up the book illustrations, painting, comic books and different techniques, and not being interested in video games at all. I’m still surprised the video game looks and platformer looks and the whole method of telling a story has not been exploited properly. Do you want to explore the idea further, telling a large scale story, journey or progress of man or another unit or theme in more metaphorical manner? Or do you wish to try completely new things in the future?
Thank you, it’s very nice of you to say that! I hope that I will indeed manage to do some things in DMC that you can’t normally do in a platformer, and take people unexpected places.. We’ll see. I must confess I don’t know where this series is going. And I’m very happy about that. You might find this insane, but I really want to be just as surprised about every new episode as the audience will [hopefully] be. Even more so, I hope there will be a response, and if people contribute with ideas.. that might take the series even further and zanier.
Also, my initial plan was to start working on a feature. And drawing flat worlds and 2D animation that doesn’t move in depth.. is much easier than involving a 3rd dimension. So.. that was the first step, and then I kept drawing and planning all sorts of stories.. like this one: A boy, a girl, 2 swords, 1000 platforms. That was one of the early ideas for a platformer-feature-film. :} They’re going to Candy Mountain to defeat the mean old man who chased them out of Candy Paradise.. or something. And they’re eating sandwiches, sitting on a platform, in mid air. And they help each other climb the mountain of platforms and defeat the tons of buzzing bees defending Candy Kingdom and so on. :} And then I thought of many other such stories, of ‘real people’ having to deal with a 2D platformer. But then for this YouTube series I wanted something simpler, no story, just craziness.
I agree the gameplay isn’t exactly featured in movies often. Strangely enough, since gameplay can be pure visual entertainment. Games on the other hand are trying really hard to become movies. Strangely enough again, since good gameplay is something very different from good storytelling, if you ask me. Story messes up gameplay and vice versa. I don’t usually see game characters as empathic humans, most of the time they feel just like game objects with a very limited, scripted agenda. They deliver information, puzzles, bullets. It won’t happen that an NPC will simply not be found where expected, because he woke up late, or felt ill, or just didn’t care. I have to be able to rely on that NPC being at work every day.. or I will get very frustrated for not being able to progress in the game. This is not only nonsense but also really boring for a story, it’s a logical progression, not a chain of unexpected events. I think gameplay is all about logic and balance, story is all about the unexpected. That being said, of course the 2 worlds can happily collide, and I think we’re only starting to understand how games can have real storytelling behind, and the movies, I hope, will also start to pump some more adrenaline or just borrow some fresh ideas from the wild world of games.
How did you end up in the particular aesthetics on your animation?
I like simple drawings, I want to focus on expression.. not on lighting and shading. I want very simple limbs for my characters, so I can draw them really fast. And I thought more seriously about some Rayman-like game-like animation, because it’s easy and fast to animate. I really like what they did in the recent Rayman 2D games, they’re expressive platformers with many simple animations that combine and flow really well. My stuff is simpler, fewer poses and animations, but I can make crazier combinations and I can adjust things on the fly. I mean a stop/skid/turn pose might be used for climbing or jumping or dodging bullets, you name it. And if I don’t like the face I erase it and pop another one in pretty quickly. Everything is based on a small number of initial drawings, like.. 5 head shapes and 5 body shapes, plus maybe a prop or two. Turn that into a bunch of poses/animations. Go crazy.
I also always loved black and white comics. I think you either do black and white line drawing, or you go with color and think in terms of color, shading, lighting, but not line. I usually don’t like colored line-drawings, I think color often looks kind of cheap and out of place there.. There are exceptions, maybe using colored lines, and I find that hard to draw. I want to be able to sketch things really quickly, focus on ideas, shapes. Keeping things black and white allows me to do that.
Read the whole thing here:
http://europeananimation.com/2014/09/01/death-maze-challenge-2014/
Thank you so much for posting Jouni, even after knowing that this series will probably not continue! : ( That's the next part of the story.. I found out meanwhile that animation on YouTube is a bit of a lost cause for now, with its current algorithms.. YouTube treats short 1-2 min episodes as irrelevant, spam content. It was a really great learning experience though, I learned a great deal about both drawing.. and sound. That being said, there will be an episode 2, and then who knows.. we'll see :}