Making a Scene

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Making a Scene

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Making a Scene is the second feature segment part of Until Dawn's Bonus Content. The video shows Behind the Scenes footage of the game’s production design, where it goes in depth about bringing the visualization of locations and characters to life.

Preview

The segment features Production Designer Lee Robinson elaborating on the production of Until Dawn. He explains that the production design started with a script describing Until Dawn’s contemporary setting, inspired by classic horror films. The script is vital to the production designer for it to be converted into an idea in mind, and later, a visual reality. The development for key locations as the Washington Lodge and Cable Car Station started from there. Much like the locations, the characters were too developed with a strong visual identity in mind, with contrasting colors, tones and silhouettes to identify them. The look and feel of the world was totally completed with the development of its atmospheric lighting, once again inspired by classic teen horror.

Transcript

[Lee Robinson] Hi, this is Lee Robinson, production designer on Until Dawn.

The production design for Until Dawn started with a great teen horror script that sets the characters in a Canadian winter mountain lodge, being a contemporary setting with visual clues derived from classic films of that genre, such as Hitchcock's Psycho and Stanley Kubrick's Shining. The storyboards are vital to the production design as it allows the designer to understand the scale of the environments to be made and the detail that would be seen to create the atmosphere of a horror.

This took us into concepts that took these storyboards further, visualising the world through the color palette, the lighting, tone and mood, and developing key locations such as the lodge, the cable car stations, the forests themselves, the wilderness.

As you can see, the environments and atmospheres changed quite a bit from warm and inviting to cold and threatening. The millionaire's mountain lodge was a key example. It was designed to be made from nearby stone and timber, embedding it into the landscape, with a contrasting and contemporary interior needing to be opulent and extravagant.

We created dark and claustrophobic corridors with ominous and large open spaces, almost cathedral-like in size, and with huge structures to silhouette and dwarf the characters within, providing a labyrinth to explore and wander. Each character was developed with a strong visual identity in mind, with contrasting colors, tones and silhouettes to identify them, each to have their own texture, pattern and shape, so that when they were lined up you could always identify them.

The costume designs allowed a range of clothes that would suit them for the cold winter weather, but also have an element of style and individualism, so that the audience could look at them and relate, recognising themselves within them. A lady would like to cuddle up with her man by a nice cosy fire bathed in atmospheric mood lighting.

[Mike] Right, it'll get plenty toasty once we're rubbing up against each other. [Jessica] Mike. Fire. And mood lighting. [Mike] Yes.

[Lee Robinson] Working with the lighting artists, we really brought the look and feel of the world together, and this required a thorough understanding of the visual language of teen horror.

A key scene was where all the characters emerge out of the rear of the lodge chasing Hannah. A contrast is evident straight away from the exterior wilderness to the warmth of the lodge. The attention to character lighting here is through the bounce and rim lighting, accented colours and composition, creating characters that come from the dark into the light and back again with an emotional effect.

[Beth] Guys, there's someone outside. What the hell? Hannah! What's going on? Where's my sister going? [Jessica] It's fine, she just can't take a joke.

Video

Until Dawn Bonus- Making A Scene