As the artist and musician, with this project I was able to practice capturing the atmosphere and mood of a piece of work using a rough, brutal style. My main philosophy is that Art Direction is more important than Art Quality. With a lot of games nowadays -- yes even visual novels -- the extreme emphasis on production values only leads in one direction: AAA production quality and its resulting headaches. Expensive graphics don't always provide for immersion. You can create immersion through music instead, like this work. Or by making the brain of the reader fill in the blanks, through the use of symbolic imagery.
Only by emphasizing Art Direction over Art Quality can low-budget outfits... such as today's Japanese game developers... be able to still compete and offer something different.
Shinbo Akiyuki and Masaaki Yuasa provide good examples where being cheap can be stylish. On the other hand Kyoto Animation and P.A. Works? Yawn.
The problem with this is the fact that the writing itself isn't that great to begin with. Overwriting to describe something instead of just describing it makes the writing bulky and harder to read. The reader will just grow bored with it regardless of how brilliant the concept is.
ReplyDeleteYour artwork too is of poor quality and looks more like something someone done in the course of fifteen minutes just to get it out of the way instead of a stylistic choice. Shinbo's stylistic choice is great to look at and looks like a final product, even the unfinished stuff. He uses camera techniques to help with cutting on the animation budget and then focuses much of the budget on a few spectacular scenes of animation that is easily comparable to higher budget animations. It's pleasing to the eyes and looks like it was made stylistically instead of inability.
If you're gonna go for a budget look, at least make it look better than something made by a twelve year old's third time on photoshop. Also, having a great script can excuse the lack of good artwork, like the works of 07th Expansion.
It's interesting you would describe the narrative style of this story as "overwriting". What specific instances are you referring to? Because, well, I thought most of the descriptions were rather concise. At least when I wrote the whole thing back in 2007.
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