Artist Research - Psyop

Psyop

Psyop Animation is an American company founded in 2001 working in a variety of media from Advertising through to Gaming. With such a broad range of animations, I have chosen to look at the 3 episode "miniseries" for the game Dishonored that they created and published with Bethesda Softworks.

Dishonored Miniseries

The Dishonoured Miniseries consists of 2 videos which are around 2 minutes in length and were created to advertise the game and also give a glimpse into the world that the game is set in. 

The general aesthetic of these animations is a dark, rough type of hand drawn animation which I assume was created using some sort of digital program frame by frame.With the majority of the animation in greyscale, the only use of colour is for objects which are key to the animation such as the lights in the city or the whales blood which helps track how the objects are related directly to each other and that they are key to the story by attracting attention in the greyscale scenes. 

The animation was obviously constructed with the narrative being created first as it is much easier to time the scenes to the audio, than to time the audio with the scenes. Once this process was completed, I assume that additional non diagetic sounds were added such as music and ambience noises as during the production process, these noises could complicate things. 

With the animation following a very dark style, the inconsistencies in the hand drawn style used only help to add to the mood. With the frequent use of dramatic lighting, fire, blood and smoke, the slight fluctuations help give a more unpredictable look and stops these natural images appearing regimented and non chaotic like the narrative suggests. 

The use of varying rough brush strokes helps give the animation a much grittier edge than if the animation was entirely clean cut and smoothly animated. Despite the more time consuming nature of 2D animation, this style helps each frame look like a painting and with the animation being narrative based, helps give the impression that it is a more tradition type of story. 

Like most short films, the animation peaks in the middle with more scenes of general violence and much quicker, action packed scenes. With animation opens with the main character before he discovers the invention and ends with him killing himself with his own product giving the whole animation a sense of irony because what he had strived from so much ended up being his downfall. 

With the animation being based off a video game, most of the backstory has already been created so the concept work for Psyop to do was not as impressive as some of their other work however their ability to collaborate and work with pre existing concepts is admirable.