Overview of where I am now

I would like to find out whether a combination of  narrative and time based media techniques can positively influence the concept art form. Im thinking that narrative techniques can only help with the world building of art right? although, most concept art is done to a brief? time based media has the ability to take you through the world rather than the image being flat and sometimes hard to read or can be lacking in immersion that time based media could give? Only thing is concept art as a thing is more focused on design and iteration than final pieces. This could be something done at the end of the concept art pipeline/process, to emphasise or market final designs? especially for social media? a lot of advertising, even on billboards now is moving. can use the art done in pre production to advertise the game? but then does this take the project away from being concept art? can time based media and narrative actally help the process of design?

maybe for showing the lay of the world to other artists on the team

line based art not polished?

need to do more research on the concept art process. find out where these things could be the most beneficial.

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Tolkien and Worldbuilding

Tolkien and Worldbuilding
Catherine Butler
[For the full published version of this essay see Peter Hunt, ed.,
J. R. R. Tolkien (New Casebooks) (Palgrave, 2013), pp. 106-20.]

* * *

"Fantasy and science-fiction novelists, game designers, and role-play enthusiasts all acknowledge Tolkien as a master in the art of constructing a universe with its own history and geography, flora and fauna, cultures and languages, magic and physics." pg1

" it is a world almost six decades in the making, and has a depth and detail to which other writers, whether for adults or children, can only aspire." pg 1

"considerations of audience may have affected the representation of Middle-earth." pg 1-2

"For Tolkien, sub-creation arises from the imaginative ability of humans to recombine elements of reality (the ‘Primary World’) in new ways. " pg2

"a Secondary World may be an imaginative space of any kind, as long as that space is sufficiently well rendered to enable Secondary Belief."pg 3

"create a world that has been ‘thought through’ to a far greater extent than is required by the plot" pg 3

"Tolkien’s greatest achievement, […] in retrospect, was in normalizing the idea of a
secondary world. Although [Tolkien] retains the hint that the action of LOTR
takes place in the prehistory of our own world, that is not sustained, and to all intents and purposes Middle-earth is a separate creation, operating totally outside the world of our experience." ph 12

"One purpose of Tolkien’s work seems to have been to create, in Humphrey Carpenter’s
resounding phrase, ‘a mythology for England'"pg 13

LOTR is " a reconstruction of what an English mythology might have looked like had it survived." PG 13

"Tolkien makes repeated use of English placenames in his work, with a substantial number deriving from the countryside near Birmingham (where he grew up) and Oxford (where he lived as an adult)." pg 16


"world caters directly to this taste. Other readers (or the same readers in other moods) valueMiddle-earth as a place to which we are geographically and temporally connected, which we can hear echoed in familiar names and landscapes, and which lends an enchantment(sometimes melancholy) to the contemplation of our own world, presenting us with vistas of a deep past from which we are nevertheless irrevocably exiled." pg 17

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Attention to distraction: a visual investigation of temporal experience through time-based media

Attention to distraction: a visual investigation of temporal
experience through time-based media
By Raef Sawford
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania
Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours), Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
University of Tasmania, April 2013

* * *

"These works challenge viewing habits and expectation through strategies of duration, re-contextualisation and re-examining" pg 4

"to offer a contemporary experience
of the here-and-now, the work must fluctuate between states of immersion and
awareness; between attention and distraction. Here, the inherent tension activated
by the intersection of these temporal states directs audience attention toward the
potential of a moment." pg 5

"For a narrative film to work – meaning that the audience becomes involved in
the story by identifying with the characters and following the action through
to its logical conclusion – time has to be compressed so that the action can flow
in a logical sequence. This creates a sense within the viewer of being present in the
diegetic world of the film – unaware of their lived experience. If the viewer were to
become aware of the discontinuity of the production process i.e. the temporal and
spatial distance between shots, then the narrative illusion would be broken" pg 26

"Of course time and space are intrinsically linked, so the strategies devised to foreground temporal awareness, such as duration and repetition also incorporated a spatial element." pg 27

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Look Into

• Structural film, or “cinémapur”
• Theorist P. Adams Sitney’s formal criteria for qualification as structural.
• Works exploring the potential for the moving image to both absorb and distance viewers
  by Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Chantal Akerman, Christian Marclay, Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Daniel Crooks and David Claerbout.
• the rejection of narrative cinema’s goal of ‘closure and fixity: Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005, p 40

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The Golden Ratio in Time-based Media

The Golden Ratio in Time-based Media
Emily Verba
4222 Dane Avenue Cincinnati,
Ohio 45223
DOP: Aug 2012
Publisher: Maryland Institute of Research
Place of publication: Annapolis
Last updated 2015-01-30

"Time-based media has the ability to expand and contract movement, thus directing the way viewers experience and spend their time." pg 56

"Life is a constant rhythm of internal and external tension and release. Time-based media7 is successful when the pacing of its editing mimics this modulation. In cinema, audiences consistently expect things to occur; as events draw near, tension builds. The event eventually takes place, and tension is released. Time-based media has the power to control emotional and physiological reactions as such." pg 61

"Pioneer Soviet director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein had an extreme fascination with Pavlovian psychology, and integrated these principles into his work. His groundbreaking efforts in film-editing, or montage, paved the way for modern filmmaking and other time-based media. He implemented techniques such as gradually decreasing the length of successive shots to tense his audience and build up to grand culminations." pg 61

"editing absorbed the audience much more than the passive presentation of information through long, static shots." pg 61

"Moving images allow us to temporarily escape our lives. They are a window into an abstracted reality, simultaneously real and unreal." pg 64

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Artist Research: Sachin Teng

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Guild Wars 2: All Race Intros (Male)

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