Crave

Video games have always been a safe haven for me, a comforting escape from a sometimes dull reality. Ironically, it's by immersing myself in games of the survival horror genre that I find the most solace... At last, something more horrifying than my own thoughts! I guess there's a therapeutic quality in slaying monsters that creep in the fog.

When Crave and I created this video together, we were inspired by the uncanny blend of reassuring familiarity and otherworldliness these games have. Drawing on the FMV aesthetic, we mixed live-action footage and 3D elements. One of my main influences is obviously Roberta William's Phantasmagoria (1995), with its blend of blue-screen shots, 3D backgrounds, and gory scenes, and Lorelei Shannon's Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996), a true masterpiece of its kind with some of the most grotesque BDSM action I've ever encountered. I was also interested in the concept of the "Tetris Effect", which refers to the sensory and mental experience some people have after playing the same video game for too long, when they begin to percieve its sounds, images or logic in their everyday lives.

I shot the footage in a studio with a green screen and John's Panasonic SDR-S7, a nice little digital camcorder from 2008, then added 3D-rendered environments made with Unreal Engine 5, while using an outrageous amount of 3D assets ripped from my favorite Playstation 2 games, as I always like to do. The editing process was a mix of compositing and in-engine rendering, as I sometimes inserted the live footage as a 3D object directly into my game engine for some of the more complex shots.

You can listen to Crave's album Inner War Delirium on Heat Crimes' bandcamp, and also check out the visualizer I made for his track Backdraft .