Introducing The Tower 2.0

Hello everyone, it's time for a somewhat lengthy behind the scenes post. I'd thought about doing this as a video but honestly just forgot to shoot enough while working on this, but I took a fair few pictures!

First and foremost, we have a brand new presentation for The Tower. 

What was featured in Episode 1 was never intended to be final but I wanted to get that episode out in decent time and also give the The Tower 2.0 it's time to be made. 

When we'd settled on the name and concept for the tower, I decided it would be most fun to present the tower physically and got to buying a whole bunch of empty game cases to get started. That's what made it into ep. 1. While shooting ep. 1 Joe and I started to discuss the idea of stop motion for presenting the games moving into and ascending the tower - this was also present in ep. 1. 

But the idea of stop motion triggered a much dumber idea in my head which was to turn the whole tower into a sort of stop-motion inspired set. 

So first up I found these very nice game storage towers. Honestly, these alone with a plain background would have been fine and a huge improvement from ep. 1.

The nice thing is they stack and so we can go very high vertically as The Tower series continues to run on. For now, the tower will be shorter and grow as needed. Also, hello Normandy sneaking in there. 

BUT, fine is never our goal with DTH content and so I had the idea of how to embed this tower into a set of sorts. 

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Here's my first sketch of the thing to see how it might work. The idea being that the closer to the bottom of the tower you are the more horrible and miserable it looks and the higher the tower climbs, the nicer it all becomes.

I especially wanted to have a matte painting background to convey the weird notes on the right hand side. A fancy gradient of sorts to go from miserable hellscape to lovely clear skies. 

Thankfully my mom rather enjoys painting, so I gave her some of the below images to convey the looks I wanted - pulling from some good video game skyboxes helped too...

So she got a fairly large canvas (48x36 inches) and set out. This is the first day, just getting the basic colors in.

Day 2, clouds, ground cover, and more detail in general has been added. Also turns out she really liked the look of Caelid (from Elden Ring) that was in one of the screenshots I provided. 

And day 3, the final pass of detail. With that, I have a very awesome looking mate painting background from her. Thanks mom!

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So, the next step was I needed to make some sort of ground platform for the whole thing. I really wasn't sure what I was doing here and unfortunately I didn't take a ton of pictures. But I basically just went to the local arts and crafts shop, walked through every isle and bought a little package or two of stuff that I thought would look good. 

What you see below is nearly the finished product. It's about as basic as you can get when it comes to construction. It's a flattened cardboard box, some foam packaging in areas, and a coat of paper-mache to hold it all together. 

Then I covered the majority of it with a layer of black soil to hide the newspaper and then the main top soil layer was added. It's real moss apparently, so that explains why my allergies act up when I'm near the thing! I also integrated a few smaller details of black and red moss strands creeping around. 

The center is where the tower will stand, the left side there is our special new addition: The Graveyard. When a game is so bad we deem it unworthy to even sit in the tower, it will sit atop the graveyard. A place of true dishonor and shame. It sits atop the corpses of several other miserable games. 

Again, sorry for not having a ton of pictures for the making of this. 

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So with the main base complete, the matte painting slides in behind it and... yeah it honestly turned out better than I imagined. And I haven't even cracked the lights out yet to bring it all together. 

My next step, which you'll only see in full once Episode 2 is live, was lighting my little set and filming all the shots I need for the episode. I've got a fair bit of camera and lighting equipment from the old days of doing some movie work, so I blacked out my office and starting setting everything up. 

I've got two big and fancy LED lights with matte boxes and gels and the whole shebang. There's a smaller little LED fill light in the front and I realized that having a bit of light behind the painting itself made things look cool, especially the red of Caelid. So on the left there's a lamp from my living room just lying on its side lighting that up! Movie Magic!!

And that more or less brings it all together. Below are a few bonus shots of what it all looks like in camera. 

I'm probably going to shoot more stuff for episode 3 to have a really fun little intro for the series going forward. I might end up doing it for episode 2 but we'll see... I'll also be getting better at lighting and shooting the set in general as the series progresses. This was the first time I'd done any live action stuff in a very long time.

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The Tower in camera as it was (game wise) at the end of Episode 1:

Oh I bought a little mist making device that you put in water and it makes mist, to emulate smoke/fog. There was no way I was buying and using a fog machine in my house. Here's The Graveyard with "fog" and all the lighting:

Here's what it looks like when a game begins it's placement on The Tower. The stop-motion aspect here is something I am thinking of ways to improve even further for the future:

Zelda getting ready to be ranked:

One last bonus, we decided that if the times comes that we're ranking a game we feel so strongly about, that we think is so good it should be beyond the tower, it will instead ascend into the heavens and rest among the clouds. This is my first attempt at adding some real world 3D clouds to the painting:

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That's all! Episode 2 will be coming soon (next week) and will feature all the new presentation stuff. I hope everyone likes this weird silly idea. We always want to do things a bit differently and I'm quite happy with how it's all turned out.

-Jamison