Unstoppable Gorg
Stage direction provided by our Art Director, who also created the robot suit. He won’t thank me for posting this, but I just had to :)
We wanted to simulate a gas planet, so we used actual gas - the glass bottles in the background are full of smoke. Professional flashlight action completes the effect. Our handy mirror surface makes another appearance, as does compressed air.
Note the careful coreography of three experts at work, carefully plotting out the path of the spacecraft (squishy rubber brain inside an transparent ball with string attached). Don’t try to emulate at home kids.
Best part of having a practical model of your evil villains lair is that you can demolish it at the end with real blowtorch. A fairly small blowtorch, but with some compressed air the effect is impressive enough.
Surprisingly, a lot of people turned out to witness this event. And the smell of it lingered for quite a bit. And we had to turn off the fire alarm.
Here’s a shot of how it turned out in the final scene.
As meteors really are just rocks in space, we opted to use rocks as well. This one is really simple, just a starry matte background, a spotlight, a highspeed camera and some artfully dropped rocks. The hand in the beginning is there to get the focus to the right plane.
and here is the pullback :)
Since it’s Sunday, it’s time to sit back and relax.
This is the straight-out-of-camera shot of our saucer crashing - well, one of many such shots. We used a fairly inexpensive, consumer level highspeed camera - since we were going to post process the videos to look 1950’s anyway, high resolution was not something we needed.
In the shot everything is real - rocks in the background and corn starch for moon dust. There’s another blog post on the creation of the saucer itself :)
While we at Futuremark ride the forefront of 3D graphics, even our wizards would be hard pressed to produce the particle effect shown here.
Unstoppable Gorg - Main Theme
Behind the music of Unstoppable Gorg
I was contacted sometime late 2011 by Jaakko Haapasalo from Futuremark. He told me they were
developing a tower defense game based on 50’s scifi theme with humor and visuals to match.
Although they had an intro movie already done with stock music, they still felt that original compositions were needed for the menus and in-game backgrounds. Being a long-time fan of Ed
Wood’s films and also Tim Burton’s Ed Wood and Mars Attacks! I was familiar with the style and
felt confident that I could pull it off.
When visiting Futuremark offices we decided I should demo the in-game music first so the team
could use it right away in the levels to test how it fit the mood. I’m always happy to make demos,
because it’s better to make an example rather than just talk about how it should be done. Demos
usually end up being the starting point for the final score anyway, just like happened in this project.
To make the music differ from typical full-blown orchestra game style, I decided to go with 50-60’s
lounge groove, influenced by Esquivel and similar artists, and spice it up with horns and strings to
create film score atmosphere without making it too big. Jazz drums and double bass started the
whole thing with a jerky groove slightly unconventionally in 5/4 time signature. To accompany the
bass I added a rare instrument called Tubax, a special contrabass saxophone I had made many
years back, playing it at the start of the bars to add some grunt and attitude. Triple horns,
trumpets, cellos, violas and soprano choir provided the rest of the ingredients and the demo song
started to take shape.
From the early discussions with Jaakko it was clear that I should try to have Theremin present in
the tracks. This pre-historic syntheziser invented in 20’s by Russian fellow Leon Theremin has been used in many films of the era, also later in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood by the great film composer
Howard Shore. That distinctive howling sound is as B-movie as one can get, everyone recognizes it!
Being a musician myself, I wasn’t that keen on using sampled or plug-in Theremin though, it just
wouldn’t feel right. Luckily, my cellist friend from the world music band I lead called Alamaailman
Vasarat, had constructed one in the form of a fish (!) and I borrowed it for the demo track. This
home-made model was very fishy to play with but it demoed the sound nevertheless. I guess it
was good enough, because Futuremark guys liked it and I got the job!
Right away I contacted my musician friends, namely guitarist Jarmo Saari who I knew from many
years back when we shared the stage with Alamaailman Vasarat in Tokyo. He had a Theremin and a lot of experience playing it. In his opinion, original Bob Moog’s Theremins from the actual era are still the best designs out there. So, I got myself the best model together with Moog’s ring
modulator pedal and joined the Gorg invasion! Jaakko and rest of the Futuremark team were very
supportive right from the start and gave me a lot of freedom to experiment, for which I’m very
grateful. All in all, the whole project was one of the most memorable game productions I’ve been
involved with!
You can get the menu music for Unstoppable Gorg and main theme right here :)
Stakula
Composer, sound designer, woodwind player
www.stakula.com
www.alamaailmanvasarat.com
Unstoppable Gorg - Gorg on the Menu
This is the music from the menu screen. I will be posting the main theme tomorrow :)
Once we finished building the suit for Radiant Beem we got the amazingly smart notion of taking it out for a spin at the local strip mall. As luck would have it, the local department store had a huge sale going on and had their own mascot walking around, who quite apparently was a bit puzzled by our appearance. :)
On the downside, the appearance of our new robotic overlord did not instill the abject fear in the puny humans we were hoping for.
Originally, Unstoppable Gorg was going to be called ‘orbital defense’. The idea that the towers could be rotated around was the initial ideal for our twist in the tower defense genre - from this it was easy to place the game in space and the towers on orbits around planets.
The 1950’s b-movie look came in quite a bit later, when we were looking for an unique look for the game. When doing games, there are always multiple opinions on any design choice, but the 50’s look was unanimously accepted pretty much from the get go. Things kinda ballooned from there on, but we’re glad they did - the game would not have had the ‘heart’ it does if it had ended up looking like it does in the first concept image.
One of our biggest scenes (preparation-wise) was the scene where Ariel is crowned Miss Universe. We had special glittery curtains bought for it (xmas decorations, really) and a whole bunch of confetti to throw around for the authentic look.
Unfortunately, while setting up the shot we managed to screw up the focus. We wanted a narrow field so that background curtains would be in beautiful bokeh, but that meant that if the camera or the model moved at all we’d be screwed. Which of course happened.
Due to this the scene was a bit shorter in the game than originally intended - and it required a lot more post work. Not to mention we had to sweep up the confetti which barely even shows up - though it did give us this lovely shot of the Gorg working the mop.
Here are a few before-and-after shots. While we did have a professional photographer on site, the videos we did ourselves where we had little or no experience. While we did want a bit of an amateurish look to it, there are some things that we would need to (of course) fix in post. This is where Photoshop, Premier and XSI (our 3D modeling software) magic comes in.
We also got some professional promo shots of our main characters :)
All of our ‘principal photography’ was done in a single day, though admittedly that day was fairly long. While we had done a lot of work beforehand, we had no real experience is shooting actors. And of course, most of our actors had no experience either, as they were just drafted management.
Our goal for the shoots themselves was to maintain the 50s scifi feel - while it might be cheesy, it should appear that we were trying our best rather than to make it intentionally camp.
Some of the outfits assembled for real for the first time at the studio. The Gorg outfit is basically the mask, a thermal underwear set, a cape from a Vampire costume and an Afgrhan tribal wedding necklace - the last two pilfered from our photographer Ajaton Joki’s stockpiles. Ariel’s second costume - a real 50s vintage dress - was too small for her, and had to be left completely open in the back which you (un?)fortunately cannot see in the final shot.
LouLou D’vil came with her own outfit, which was probably for the best. :)
We did three or four shots of each scene and moved on. There was little time to check the footage, so mostly we just hoped we got what we needed. Fortunately as all audio would be added in post we did not have to worry about that at all.
It took us some 12 hours all in all, and while exhausting lots of fun was had by all. Judging by the general reaction we’ve seen in game reviews, the heart we put into the cutscenes shows through :)
