Blurring the Line

Over the past few months I have begun to rediscover my interest in video games. For several years I thought of them as childish and wanted no part of them. I have only recently looked at them as artwork, and that change in perpective was brought on by viewing the trailer for Assassin's Creed Revelations

I have never been so immersed in a trailer for a video game, at points I truly felt I was watching a film. The attention to and level of detail is astounding. This piece is phenomenal on every level, aside from the outstanding visuals that border on photorealism the music playing along with it is perfect. It captures the epic journey that is taking place within the brief length of the video.

The idea of video games as art is something that I ignored for far too long. I am excited to come back to the video game world with an entirely new perspective and re introduce myself to interactive art.

Violins, Assassin's Creed, and Parkour

One of my friends a couple of weeks ago showed me this video of an amazing violinist, Lindsey Stirling. He said, "Danielle, you have to see this girl. She's freaking amazing." Expecting to see some live performance or a classic homemade youtube video where the girl presses the record button, gives a little introduction, and then plays some really complicated music, I was pleasantly surprised to see such a beautiful and well made video accompany such a talented artist. I could not tell at first whether I was more impressed by the musician or the cinematographer.

The cinematographer, who makes his living solely off of youtube videos, is Devin Graham. I could not find much biographical information on Devin, except that he is primarily located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Lindsey and Devin have teamed up to create a multitude of sensational videos since early 2012. My favorite videos tend to be the ones that contain medleys from video games like Zelda and Skyrim. I also throughly enjoy the Lord of the Rings one and of course the video 'Shadows,' which you can watch on the link above. These videos are visually very aesthetically pleasing. First off, the locations are incredible. For the Lord of the Rings video they actually went to New Zealand, where they shot the LOTR trilogy, and for the Zelda video they are in an unspecified location, but it is in the mountains of a beautiful, desolate, area that is absolutely breathtaking. The colors on these videos are gorgeous and highly saturated. The pacing and style of the editing and video effects are fantastic and create a lot of energy. What I also love about these videos is that the cinematographer, Devin, often releases a Behind the Scenes video to accompany the original, which is very helpful in understanding how he filmed it (what camera he used) and how he did some of his stunning visual effects. He often uses his RED Epic, 5Dmkii (which he has now upgraded to a mkiii), and his Glide Cam HD 4000.
Here is another video that blew me away.

For those who don't know, Parkour is when someone finds a route from point A to point B and tries to quickly go from one place to another in the quickest, most efficient, and (sometimes) most entertaining way while encountering several obstacles in-between.
To make this video happen, I love the attention to detail Devin Graham has because he knows if something video game related is done wrong, this could upset the diehards gamers. He worked hard on getting a good costume, score, and making sure that his (stunt) actor played the game for inspiration on how to walk and execute moves similar to the video game character. He also mentioned that he did not get a permit to shoot anywhere because he did not want to close off sections of streets and instead wanted to have regular non-actors in the background because in the video game, this character runs amongst similar crowds. Granted, I haven't played Assassin's Creed so I don't know if he is accurate or not, but if he says that he tries to stay true to the video game, I believe he does whatever he can to closely resemble the game's character in a modern day setting because he is very thorough with all of his videos.
If you haven't seen any of his videos already, you should definitely check them out!