Tuesday 17 February 2015

City and Film - Memorable Landscaping in Animation


An admirable trait for visual mediums is often the ability to portray a city setting in a memorable fashion. It is a common trope among film noir that the city setting is emphasised greatly and portrayed in a dark manner, with heavy shadow, edgy locations, and high contrast streetlights in a nighttime setting. In sci fi films set in the future, it is often imperative that the city setting be as imaginative and ambitiously designed as possible. This is why films like Blade Runner and Metropolis are popular examples of future settings.

The use of architecture is not only limited to live-action film either, cartoons like Batman: the Animated Series, and Futurama focus greatly on the city and landscapes. The video game, The Wolf Among Us is deliberately film noir inspired in terms of approach towards the areas of the city scenes are set in.

It is common for animations that take place in a fictional world to take inspiration from real life and other fictional settings and landscapes. For examples, there is an area in Dark Souls called Anor Londo that is based on the Milan Cathedral, and was remarkably designed to make the player feel accomplished as they make it there. In fact Dark Souls is known very well for its ability to tell the story in the architecture. Similarly to how Adventure Time hints at its backstory, the areas in Dark Souls are designed with mise-en-scene that effectively hints at the game's lore.

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