The Idea of the Scene

I had to decide what I was going to do for my bachelor thesis and I knew that I wanted to do an environment that’d allow me to improve the skills and get a nice piece for my portfolio. From my past projects, I knew that designing a whole environment as well as producing it is very hard and time-consuming. I wanted to focus on improving my modeling, texturing, and artistic skills.

At that point, I had followed Simon Stålenhag for quite some time so choosing his art as the basis for the project was an easy decision. By relying on his illustrations, I could both focus on producing good assets and improve artistically. I wanted to understand why he did what he did, how he achieved this mood in his paintings, how he worked with the shapes and composition. For me, it was sort of a master study, I just worked with another medium.

Choosing the Concept

I bought The Electric State book after I made the decision to base my thesis on Simon’s work and became even more impressed. The whole book is full of mystery and darkness. As a reader, I constantly tried to understand what had happened, what pushed the world to the edge, why the characters were making the road trip and so on. I decided to convey this experience through my art and stay true to the original.

When finally holding the book in my hands, I also had to decide which illustration I wanted to base my work on. I considered around five pieces based on multiple criteria.

Firstly, and quite obviously, I chose the ones I liked the most.

Secondly, I chose right from the beginning to create an animation out of the environment, as it is a great way to bring it to life even more. It had to be a picture that allowed some motion. This was also not difficult as many pictures had cars, streets, and vegetation that could be moved by the wind.

Thirdly, the scene had to be released in 4-5 months during which I also had to write around 80 pages of research paper and bachelor thesis. That meant nothing with too many crazy models and textures so that I could focus on producing less with higher quality.

Fourthly and lastly: no characters. My characters always become quite derpy, plus diving deeper into human anatomy, character animation, and texturing for this project was way out of scope. I didn’t want to endanger my scene through any abominations crawling out of the uncanny valley.

The scene I chose met all the criteria and also had four illustrations of the same place which meant plenty of source material to work with. They were the culmination of the story and not accompanied and explained by the text. I was really caught by that scene and could not resist to take it.