Chris: Environment

Environment project

Environmental storytelling:

The art of environmental storytelling is a way to tell a story though visual cues in an environment. This can be done in most mediums movies, books drawings and of course video games.

The visual cues are almost anything in the environment, big or small, furniture, dirt/dust, colours, even the architecture tells a story. These things tell the audience different things that build up an idea of the people who inhabit this environment, the events that happened in that environment.

BloodBorne: Looking into this picture, we can get a good idea of the type of place this is even with out the context of the game.

We can tell this is a safe warm place to be, this is mainly thanks to the lighting and the fireplace. The place is quite messy and its clear that no one here cleans the place, as well as it makes the place look like its been thrown together and has been this way for a while. The architecture appear quite Gothic, so we gain an sense of the time period this takes place in.

The weapons and tools make it clear this is some kind of workshop, and with all the books stacked all over the room its clear at one point someone was doing a lot of research here. The fact that there are weapons here as well as books make it seem like someone was researching weapons and possibly different forms of combat.

Its also clear that there is also some religious objects here in this room as well, both the alter and statue of a women in the back makes it seem like room was once or still is a holy place.

By looking of a simple picture you are able to collect all this information about this location and this world. (not including characters)

Planning:

When given the brief, I already had an idea for my environment, part of a story I had planned 2 years ago, so I thought this would be the best idea to work with for this project. In short the environment would be a small old ballroom, converted into a sort of “Frankenstein’s lab” kind of room, a re-animation lab.

I compiled many reference images for both the overall room and mood, as well as individual objects. There wasn’t really a set time period but I wanted to have retro servers and computers. plus a reference to one of my favorite sci-fi story’s.