Finding Order, Designing Chaos
Read MoreA new first-party game development studio, Jar of Sparks was founded by award-winning game developers including Halo Infinite's Head of Design, Jerry Hook. Founded with a mission to create a new generation of narrative-driven action games with immersive worlds, the studio came to Territory to create a brand film that presents its philosophy to help introduce it to the industry and the wider gaming world. With an open brief, we could play strong art, production, music, and overall directorial roles throughout the development of the film.
The film was created using a combination of cinema 4D and simulation techniques created with Houdini, all rendered out with Redshift. Ai was used early on in the exploration phase to help create the other worldly landscapes which resulted in a composition that is both innovative and provocative.
We underwent an explorative journey to uncover and then visualise the concept for a brand film. In doing so we uncovered several narrative and visual themes we could use to inform the film, including “Chaos and Order”, “Awake. Spread. Resistance.”, and “The Cosmic Triangle Model”.
The Cosmic Triangle model, a relatively new theory of the universe, is based on the idea that the universe is shaped like a triangle, with the three vertices representing three fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and strong nuclear force.
Following a rule of three, the themes “Awake”, “Spread”, and “Resistance” became three key beats of the film’s narrative arch which we developed into storyboards. From here, we used harmonic subdivisions to ensure that all shapes in-frame were precisely reflective of a grid system – allowing the triangles to be, travel across or grow from calculated vectors.
Our team studied the Chaos and Order theory and began to tether their visuals from scientific methods, ideas and philosophies that surround the theory. The Lorenz attractor, for instance, served as a simulation model following it’s representation of a dynamic system that can and will evolve into a new state of being following a long enough period of time.
The music for the film was created in-house – allowing us further creative control and a closer, more fluid relationship with the visuals. Initial drafts were refined from complex symphonies to a simple, three-note theme – allowing Jar of Sparks’ to have their creative avenues unbeholden to a distinctive sense of sound.
With each of the shots for the film standing at four seconds long, the BPM remains at a steady sixty with the only other musical instrument seeing a drum beat actioned on the changing of each on the shot.