Probably one of my favourite talks over the two days has to come from Brian Horton, the senior art director at Crystal Dynamics who worked on the Tomb Raider reboot 2013, in which his talk today was entitled 'Creating a Believable Hero: The Rebirth of Lara Croft'.
Anthropology: An Application of the Past
First we began with a little bit of background history to the character which is Lara Croft. The original Lara was designed by Toby Gard and he envisioned her to be a smart, athletic archeologist seeking out relics which had hidden powers. Lara became the queen of action and adventure so quickly and was featured in not only the games but in comics and films as well. But during this stage she become somewhat of a virtual sex symbol instead of this strong and intelligent heroin, but this is where the next generation of Lara began, until Angel of Darkness and the second film.
Fortunately Crystal Dynamics where there to pick up the pieces with Legend, Anniversary and Underworld. For 15 years Lara remained virtually the same so they needed to be rethought from the ground up. They wanted to reimagine her as a young and believable heroin and use this to create an origins story.
Identifying a theme: Survival
First they began to look for inspiration for the character, in which they started by looking at Evangeline Lilly, who played Kate in Lost, and then also the film The Descent, which is said to be one of the best survival movies out there. With there concept art they wanted to think big and then narrow it down later and by doing this Lara got pretty crazy looking before they could get the perfect look that we've seen this year. They also wanted to use the idea that the island was brutal and it was actually her against the island, but instead grounded this slightly by making it her against the people on the island instead.
Keeping Lara Grounded
With the character of Lara Croft they wanted you to be able to look at her and say, yes that's Lara, but be able to notice the different between her and then other versions. We no longer get the two pistol look but the bow and axe also become part of her silhouette. They played around with her hair quite a bit, by making it look messy as she would have been windswept quite a lot. For the actual character creation they used one person to model on her face and then a different actress for the body, in which they created the model from this. They had different faces of looks for her which included different layers of mud and blood on then for different parts of the gameplay. A lot of the animation that was done for this game is either MoCap, done by Camilla Luddington, who also voiced her in the game, or by key framing in scenes where motion capture is too difficult to do.
Brian Horton then went through a few clips from the game, talking over then to give us insight into what thought process went into creating each scene:
Opening First Level
The way in which they created the graphics for this was in quite an art driven and used a lot of cinematography to create intuitive camera angles. During this scene the camera is always very close to Lara, this shows the fear in her face when she looks around, but also gives the feeling of claustrophobia, as there is nothing but walls and Lara's top half on the screen, making not a lot of room for anything else. She then collects fire in the form of a torch. Fire is a very primal tool but it's something that she will use throughout the game and it will aid her in many ways. We then got the introduction to water, and enemy to fire and therefore an enemy to Lara. After solving puzzles in the opening first level, like Indiana Jones, you get out of there as fast as possible as you know the whole place is going to come down. At the end of the scene she looses her torch, her beacon of hope, and as she scrambles towards the light at the top, this symbolises her final rebirth into the world around her.
Tower Climb Scene
During this scene we see Lara climb to the top of a very tall radio tower We see this as Lara starting to build her confidence as a character as she climbs higher and higher. We see her start to grow more into her character and into a woman at the same time by carrying out this task set by her mentor, who in this case is Roth, and halfway up we get this incredible cinematography as Lara looks over the edge, only to provoke a fear of heights in all of us.
Monastery Escape Scene
Once again we see Lara very high up, during her escape from the giants, but this time on the edge of a small and extremely windy platform, The world is essentially blowing away and at the same time we can see lovely animations of Lara covering her eyes from the wind and using her hands on the wall next to her.
Last Level
The last level showcases the strange weather of the island very well and also demonstrates all of the skills that you have learned throughout playing. It is showing how her character has developed all this way from the young girl we came to the island with and it now shows that she will do anything for her friends and face any challenge, much like the Lara we know today. This time the camera, however, uses clever cinematography to pull away from Lara, an interesting trick to make her feel small in a very big place, but obviously show off the incredible environment around her as well, which accompanied with the dramatic and almost epic music tells us that Lara has finally become that hero.
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