Another World 2021

Another World has always been an inspiration to me. As a child, the first time I saw the cinematic intro, I understood that it was possible to create stories, characters and worlds without leaving my own room.

30 years later, technology has taken a giant step forward and we find ourselves at the gates of a world where digitality and reality are merging. For all these reasons, the story of this video game and how its creator made it possible, is even more fascinating.

For the realization of this project I took advantage of the frames of the original short film to serve as storyboard.

The visual composition, camera framing and duration of the shots have remained faithful to the original story. From there, I worked more on the materials, textures and lighting to give it a more cinematic look.

I´ve also included some elements to meet the original piece, like the sounds, interfaces screens and the original music (by J-F Freitas) .

The goal is to respect the basic volumetry that makes each scene easily recognizable.

I have used some models previously created from sites like Megascans or Blendswap and others I have created myself. For the character of the professor, as it could not be otherwise, I have taken advantage of the recent appearance of the Metahumans.

As with the modeling, for the materials I have used different sources: some downloaded and others created by me, making mixtures and blending them.

The materials used are mainly stones, metals, plastics, crystals and emissives.

All the animation and lighting process has been done inside the Unreal Engine´s sequencer. Some animations have been done by hand and others are taken from mocap data. To simplify the process, I used a camera plate with an overlay of the original story. It's a process similar to rotoscoping that made it much easier for me to mimic the animations.

I have tried to take special care of the lighting to keep the nightly and mysterious atmosphere of the original story.

Comparing some data from my project with the original story, we can appreciate the enormous leap that personal computers have made. And it also shows the great difficulty that Eric Chahi had to face to achieve this accomplishment.

For example, the resolution of the original intro was 320x200 pixels. This project is rendered at 4K (3840x2160). That's 129 times bigger!

In 1991, the video game ran on an Amiga with 1MB of RAM. Today, my computer has 64,000 times more memory!

If you want to read a little more about this exciting work, there is a page about the author and his creation process: http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/index.htm

And of course, you can also buy this jewel of video games, Another World -20th Anniversary Edition: https://store.steampowered.com/app/233550/Another_World__20th_Anniversary_Edition/

Thanks for watching!