Concept Art/Transcript

This is the transcript of "Concept Art," part of The Making of Heavy Rain. 
== Transcript ==
(An ESRB logo appears, followed by the PlayStation logo. An Origami Murder Bird appears on a white background, and black ink runs down to reveal the phrases "THE MAKING OF HEAVY RAIN" and "CONCEPT ART.")
Narrator: From the very beginning with Heavy Rain, we were looking for the kind of atmosphere you find in detective movies: dark, cold and disturbing, but also mysterious and fascinating.
(Concept art of the City's streets appears.)
Narrator: The artistic direction grew out of the Origami Killer's modus operandi: drowning in rainwater. Right from the start, rain appeared as the key to the story.
(Video footage from "The Motel" and "The Old Warehouse" plays.)
Narrator: It lends fatality to our tale, but also the feeling of an insurmountable force; the impression that we're fighting against elements that will continue on course whatever we do. Whatever happens, the rain will fill the tank, drowning the Origami Killer's victims little by little. Ethan will fight relentlessly against this fatality.
(Video footage from the game's opening credits plays.)
Narrator: Human misery and sadness are added to this irresistible and increasingly murderous power. The captured children all come from underprivileged backgrounds with nothing to fall back on.
(Concept art of various locations in the City appears.)
Narrator: It was only logical to conjure up the great cities of the East Coast. The game is close to Se7en, and like it, it also needed a strongly typed "urban" environment. We retained Philadelphia.
(Video footage of real-life cities compared with early production footage of the game appears.)
Narrator: In the preparatory stages of Heavy Rain, some of the team went to spend a few weeks in Philadelphia with cameras and movie cameras, soaking up the strange atmosphere, particularly in the more run-down districts where the story would unfold.
(Video footage of Steve Kniebihly plays. The caption "Assistant Director Steve Kniebihly" appears.)
Steve Kniebihly: Several elements impressed us. The kindness of the people, the violence of the city, the poverty, the barbed wire and the old factories in half of the neighborhoods.
(Concept art of the junkyard appears.)
Kniebihly: Without meaning to convey a message, the subtext of Heavy Rain also has something to say about the social aspect of America.
(Video footage from "Covered Market" plays alongside images of real-life indoor food markets.)
Kniebihly: The images we brought back from Philadelphia were very useful in rendering the backgrounds of Heavy Rain, but also in making its ambience more vivid and really giving it a meaning.
Narrator: To translate these ideas, we decided to call in an artistic director from the movie world. We were impressed by his work on The Crimson Rivers, and gave him the difficult task of creating immense sets, transformed by rain and misery. Most of all, we wanted to have a cinematographic point of view in our video game plot.
(Concept art by Morgan Yon and François Baranger appears.)
Narrator: The initial sketches resulted in more than 90 sets, almost all of which were retained in the course of the game. From the grim little motel room to the majestic highway in the rain and the run-down suburbs steeped in depression, the degree of perfection attained in these conveyed the background mood of Heavy Rain. The initial artistic concept resulted in a gigantic tableau in the form of the storyboard displayed in Quantic Dream's offices, that drove the whole team and constantly confronted them with the main elements of Heavy Rain's plot: a disturbing story, set against a background that is dank and squalid and majestic all at once.
(Video footage from "The Mall" and the opening credits plays.)
Narrator: In fact, after the mall scene, we had to create a break by immediately introducing the real atmosphere of Heavy Rain. It was evoked in the opening credits, with everyday scenes with characters in the foreground and the omnipresent rain. This enabled us to highlight the city where the story unfolds as a powerful character. The idea of texts placed in the set came from David Fincher's Panic Room. The credits scene is one of the most powerful scenes in the game, one that really lends it a unique color and ambience. A rainy day, an element in itself, it becomes a player in the story in spite of itself, justifying the presence of the Origami Killer on the one hand and the uneasy atmosphere that pervades the story on the other. It is a prime scenario element: it lends a dull color to this grim and sad story.
(The PlayStation 3 logo appears, followed by the Sony logo.)
Category:Transcripts