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PA:Dima, what kind of art and artists have you been drawing on?

DV: Yes, well it’s not from specific artists. Overall Inuit or Iñupiaq, because they have such different and very unique styles, that could compete with any other culture like Egypt or Greece. It’s really beautiful, very simple, like for example when they wrote on the bones and scrim they capture and keep the organic shape that’s actually beautiful and at the same time they reveal it by carving something special. I was inspired by how they do that and I was trying to do the same thing in the game.

For the game we were trying to build we very carefully looked at every scrim and every piece that ‘s there. It goes through a lot of filtering. When I’m directing I’m trying to make sure we don’t have anything on the screen that’s not adding to the art, adding to the style.

How we worked together on the art is, in Barrow, I learned, when we went there two weeks ago, I met an actual artist and showed them the game and the graphics that I drew. They were very interested in how close the style that I developed on my own by looking at the art, they feel like, wow, that’s very good, and I was very pleased to hear that.

SV: This is actually our second trip to Barrow, we went about in February of last year, was our first time up. We met with artists who were doing scrimshaw and Dima was really inspired by the bone carvings. There isn’t a lot of written record. Iñupiaq mythology was transmitted orally, primarily passed down through story-time. They did have this one type of art that recorded stories, scrimshaws, the bone carving. Dima was immediately drawn to that and used that method to tell some of the meta-components of the story. Dima and the team brought that to life, it actually starts at a carving that comes to life, almost, like a comic sequence. That was a great example of really being inspired by something traditional and using that style and altering it a little bit to bring it into a modern context.