A Little Accuracy with Your Artistic License
Landform Detectives was one of my very first projects at Filament. The game had all kinds of interesting art and Flash issues!
We had three different artists going in three different directions with their interpretations of geological processes that JASON (understandably!) wanted to be as accurate as possible. It also seemed like no matter how many times we iterated on each animation, something visually wonky or glitchy would pop up in a single frame and we'd have to do it one more time to get it ironed out.
The really unforgettable hiccup for me, though, concerned the animation for the Mediterranean island of Santorini. I animated Santorini myself, making an informed guess as to how it would have formed. I thought it was a pretty dang good guess. Little did I know that one of the grad students working with our project content expert, Bob Ballard, happened to be one of a handful of experts in the world on the geology of Santorini.
Turned out my guess wasn't so accurate.
Working directly with the expert, though, I was able to run with it and produce an animation that was both really cool and really accurate.
So my initial pass at animating for a Filament game was a little rocky, but I had a ton of fun with it. Accurately illustrating the geological complexity of a formation like Santorini is satisfying stuff, especially when you've still got a little room for artistic interpretation to make it your own.