The next person who spoke today was Viktor Antonov, a design director who works at ZeniMax Media who worked more recently on the game Dishonored. He's been in the business for 15 years now and is a concept artist, painter, director and more recently a writer. He does a lot of preproduction work for many different companies along with freelancing which are mostly hand drawn. He's obsessed with places and locations and believes that capturing images of places is the most important part. He also believes the most important tool is the skeleton of a building, and not focusing on the negative space that lies within the city that our eyes are usually drawn to.
He states that people assume that New York is a very organised city when it was built but in fact it is a mess of buildings with empty spaces in between. He is very inspired by the work of Hugh Ferris and his 1920s architect images as he would draw out modern day utopias. He would create a whole piece of art by covering a sheet of paper in charcoal and then using an eraser to add in the light areas. A director who found his work interesting made a film out of this that was set in a German Metropolis, that was filmed in a 40-50 metre set and then actors would be added in after. Hugh Ferris took a lot of inspiration from images of futuristic cities such a Metropolis.
When looking back at Viktor Antonov's work throughout the years it is truly incredible how well this man can draw. His earlier artwork included work for the French film Renaissance which had a very black and white noir look to it and was set in Paris 2054. He hand drew out all of his concept art using markers and they were all presented in black and white, as he feel concept art should be drawn roughly, sloppily and fast. He then worked on The Crossing, where it showed that things in the future where generally bigger in terms of building size and height. He kept to the French theme, as he created all the buildings to be made out of limestone, but he imagined the renaissance had never happened so that Paris was never made.
So moving onto Dishonored and Viktor Antonov's version of concept art, which again is just amazing to look at. He again stuck to his rule that you should first create black and white version of your artwork and then transfer them into colour once your happy. In terms of Dishonored he worked with the fact that there was going to be a number of tall buildings but looking at a type of feudal system in which the rich would like nearer the ground moving up to the poor at the top where they would have to walk up all the stairs to get to there rooms.
Originally Dishonored was going to be a game set in Japan, but due to the fact they did not know the layout and that cost of going would have been a lot of money they changed the idea to London as it has a very old history with the era they wanted to work with so it was perfect to look at. They started by creating basic 3D sketches and did a lot of research into the essence of London and what it meant to live there, and also used Warwick Castle for inspiration later on. They wanted to chose a specific art style that would be carried all the way from the buildings, architecture and then to the characters and vehicles, in which they would concentrate on different viewpoints so that if we were going to look at the world, how would it look from say the perspective of a rat? Just a nice little touch to ensure every angle is exciting.
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