Items tagged with 'Art'

Just like an amazing unseen creature captured on film by David Attenborough and his BBC film crew, on a recent train journey to Scotland, Alex managed to sneak up on Rex unawares, and capture this footage of the man at work, filling a page of his sketchpad with nonsense.

Click through to see the final piece, and what happened next…

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When we launched this new web site type place into your life a few months ago, we also published a couple of history articles looking back at the beginnings of Mm and of LittleBigPlanet, which we put together by trapping Alex Evans in a room with a tape recorder, shouting “Go!” and then sitting back for a few hours. This of course means that we are relying on Alex’s notoriously twisted memory, and should take it all with a pinch of nutmeg: we already found out one thing was a total lie, but the rest seems to be quite true!

The first couple of chapters looked at the founding of the studio, pitching the game to Sony,  and building the team up. We left it on a cliffhanger of sorts…. which we will now continue with Chapter 3: Building the game. If you haven’t read the other parts, then I recommend you do so immediately. No not later, now, just do it!

After a fairly intense six months, the small gang of Molecules had been given the green light from Sony to go into full production. Up until now the company had been formed entirely of Lionhead leavers and friends, but now there was a game to make, and some money to make it with, so Media Molecule started to grow.
They advertised, interviewed, hired, all whilst continuing to work on the game…

“It was a weird one, we’d hired key people, but we were all working on such independent things. We didn’t really work together, we discussed together, but there was so much to do that we just… well I could work on a 3D engine, but there was no hope of it integrating with Dave at that stage, Dave was working on a level editor… the PC editor was one of the first things that was made - post green light, we very much focussed on creative tools.”

Read the rest…

Leave a pen and paper in the hands of one of our artists, and give them a long meeting to endure, and you’ll end up with some funky drawings. These sketches seem to be of various people from an art and design meeting, see if you can guess who they are by using the photos on the about page.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world’s favourite image manipulation suite, and chief tool used in the making of lolcats, Photoshop.
Let’s raise an overly lens-flared champagne glass in celebration!

Computer Arts interviewed a selection of pixel-loving doodle gurus about how Photoshop has changed their lives, including our very own Rex Crowle. Here’s what he did say to them.

What was the first version of Photoshop you used?
Version 5.0 as far as I remember, before that I’d been using Corel PhotoPaint (as it came free with my “Multimedia PC”) and before that, Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.

What were your first impressions?
Initially I was a little disappointed, as it had less plugins than PhotoPaint and no animation features. But, I hadn’t learnt at that stage that plugins are generally pointless, it’s how you use the basic tools that matters!

How would your job be different if Photoshop didn’t exist?
I would destroy a lot more forests-per-day than I currently do.

What do you hate about Photoshop?
The ease of undoing! It can be easy to obsess over redrawing tiny elements to get them perfect, hammering away on the Apple-Z keys, and completely losing the flow of the main piece.

If you had to give one Photoshop tip, what would it be?
Keep it simple and don’t get too distracted by software features. A good idea should still work even if you draw it in MS Paint with a trackball. Although it’ll look rubbish, so don’t do that.

Head on over to Computer Arts to check out all the other similar interviews, including one with our friend Jon Burgerman.

Oh and remember, Photoshop is a powerful and dangerous ally, and not everyone should be allowed to use it.

If you are in or near to Brighton, UK, why not pop down to the Fishing museum on the seafront this weekend, and take a gander at the Pixel Hail exhibition, where art by our very own Jim Unwin and Kareem Ettouney will be on show. We’ll be heading down tonight to a private showing, ooh aren’t we fancy?

22nd May – 24th May 2009 – The Art of Videogames
An exhibition of art from, and inspired by, videogames

For three days, the annex of Brighton’s Fishing Museum will be taken over by a multimedia exhibition of art from, and inspired by, videogames. Award winning videogames artists will exhibit, alongside artists who’s lives are meshed in someway with the world’s largest entertainment industry: videogames.

Private view: the Friday night opening event will play host to the UK and Brighton’s games luminaries as well as artists and members of the press. A mobile phone auction on the evening will give away an exclusive one-off piece of game art, with all proceeds going to charity. The following two days will be a public exhibition with a special kids’ cosplay event on the Saturday afternoon outside the Fishing Museum.

Venue: Brighton Fishing Museum on May 22nd (private view on the evening), May 23rd and 24th (open all day for visitors).

Borag Thungg, Earthlets! The 2000AD Judge Dredd poster is now available as a set of desktop wallpapers. Download them below!

Download for Playstation 3

Download in 4:3

Download in 16:10 widescreen

Download for iPhone

(Links fixed now, oops!)

Our loveable Egyptian Art Director Kareem has been interviewed by Edge Online, where he talks about things with three letter acronyms –  LBP, DLC and ART. Wait that last one is just a word…

LBP to the general public was a hot game at Christmas and now it’s old news, and yet it’s now a far better game than it was when it came out. Do you in some ways regret LBP being so early on in this evolution from games being something you buy in a box to being an online, extensible platform?

Well no – we are so humbled and excited by that, and wait until you see what’s coming as well. As long as you inspire people hopefully they’ll keep on enjoying it. But what I really want to say about that is that the game industry for a long time was so powerful as a technology-driven kind of platform, and in the last 10, 15 years you start seeing cinema taking over games – huge cutscenes and lip-synching and trying to make immersive stories and believability of the world. But what we’re trying to do in LBP is to focus on expression, not impressiveness. We’ve given the bits to the people and people have – for example, the guy who made a wedding proposal. That is never going to be topped for that particular person because of the personal aspect. If we get the best studio in the world to do that level, it’s not going to mean to that person’s partner as much as his one because of the personal element. This is what LBP is all about. It’s the power of the personal and the indispensability of the individual.

Read the full interview over at Edge Online.

With great sadness Media Molecule has learnt of the death of the politician, broadcaster and irrepressible wit Clement Freud.

But death is quite the conversation stopper and moping not the way to remember such a man. Instead, here he is telling a rather fruity joke:

Our resident office doodler Rex Crowle will today be facing off against opponent Simon Cook in a match of Photoshop Layer Tennis. What’s that you ask? Rex explained it well enough on his blog, which means we can copy and paste it, how handy!

For those that don’t know the procedure, the two of us will be taking it in turns to create artwork in a series of volleys, building on what has just gone before. And with only 15 minutes for each turn its going to be a mad flurry of paper, crayons and Wacom pens.

The match kicks off at 4pm Here in the UK, which should be 11am in New York, and 8am over in San Francisco. You can watch the progress from the sidelines over on the Layer Tennis Blog.

Above: Rex Warming up for the match

Good luck Rex, may you smash, volley and ace your way to victory!

A man who had a massive influence on LittleBigPlanet, and me, has just passed away, and I wanted to mark the moment with a post to say thank you to them for all the years of inspiration.

They may not have been in the office, typing code, or pushing pixels around in Photoshop (to be honest, I would be surprised if they owned anything more modern than an electric-typewriter) but their influence is scattered thoughout our little orb of dreams.

Tony Hart was an icon of 1970 & 80s British television, through creating and presenting various art & craft shows such as Take Hart and Hart Beat, he gave a whole generation of children a love of making stuff. I’d sit in front of the tv, with a pile of cardboard and pens, trying in my basic way to do what he was doing so effortlessly on screen. And waiting, while holding my breath, for the Gallery section, where he shared some of the best artwork that had been sent in from viewers (a key element of this, the wonderful accompanying Left Bank Two music even lives on in the opening credits level of LBP).

Mr Hart wasn’t the only star of his shows. There was also the character of Morph (produced by the then newly-formed Aardman Animations) a tiny Plastercine stop-motion animated character. I’d giggle in delight as he ran around on Mr Harts work-table having various adventures, knocking over pens and running through pools of paint. A little creation that can be seen as an early precursor to a certain little sack-person that came along many years later.

We were very privileged to meet Tony Hart late last year, as the game launched – which felt like the completion of a circle for me, and I hope, in our small way, we can pass on that same love of “making stuff” to another generation with what we’ve been doing and with LBP, and all the creativity players are putting into making stuff with it.

As Stephen Fry, voice of LittleBigPlanet, said on learning of Mr Harts death, “Tony Hart gone. How Sad. Not dead, but morphed.”