Going Dark: Lighting UNTIL DAWN
Hey everyone! I wanted to share some of my work on what is probably my favourite project I've been involved with - Until Dawn! I recently celebrated my 10 year work anniversary at Supermassive, and this was my first project there... My role was the Lead Lighting Artist on the project, and I was lucky to get to work on such a great game with amazing work from so many talented people... as a Lighter its a blast to have such great characters and environments to work on, and the overall art & creative direction for the project was really great.
What was so interesting about Until Dawn from my perspective was the commitment we had to achieving a filmic look and feel in the game. This influenced the lighting a lot, both creatively and technically, from the chiaroscuro darkness, to the technical approach and commitment to 'to camera' lighting. A lot of the techniques I developed on this project have gone onto be really influential in my work, and I still look back with pride on the work on this game... and think it holds up rather well for a game almost 10 year old!
Thanks for looking and hope you like it...
One of the key project goals was a cinematic feel to the sequence lighting, so I worked on a pipeline to allow per shot lighting and make the compositions work to camera as much as possible.
The séance scene was tricky to get right. The lighting from the candles alone didnt get the form and shaping to the characters I wanted, so additional lights off screen were used.
I was encouraged to go really dark and minimal in lots of scenes... I love this approach so always tried to embrace the darkness, but still find ways to achieve separation in the shots.
A scene from near the end of the game in the caves... one of my fav locations to work with!
Ensemble scenes sometimes needed extra lights to shape the compositions, so we worked hard at ways to do this while remaining efficient at runtime.
Ashley was probably my favourite character to light in the game... the work our character team did with her was great, especially the bloodied version...
The colour language used in the game is very deliberate... a cold grading is common, but is broken away from in several key moments.
Using a 'high key, low fill' approach was common, to push the Chiaroscuro look.
The gun scene with Ashley and Chris was one of my favourite moments in the game... I loved lighting this one!
This scene was actually one of the first ones I worked on. It was where we first tested out the 'cinematic lighting' approach and lit all the camera shots separately... we really liked the results, so committed to do that for the rest of the game!
The cinema was another tricky one to get right... it had to be quite dark so some extra fog is used to help with separation.
Sometime 'less is more' was a good mantra for this game... I think letting some scenes vignette into darkness helped the overall feel. Sometimes its better to not see everything!
The environment team on this game did such a good job... such atmospheric feeling to the locations.
Josh in the caves near the end of the game after the 'killer reveal'
The prologue is a good example of one of the key grading looks... the slightly desaturate, silvery blue feel. In my mind it was to portray the cold, inescapable feel of the horror...
An example with and without the 'fill' light... we often went low or no fill on Until Dawn, the darkness and your imagination can sometimes do a better job of making things feel scary!
I loved the design of the killer mask. The team went through a lot of iteration to get to the final result.
There are lots of scenes where the character are holding light sources, so special care has to be taken with lighting these when working to camera.
Dr Hill... I loved how his scenes turned out.
I was really pleased how this scene turned out... A more dramatic action moment, so we used fire as a secondary light source to add drama.
This is from the ending scene... It's one of my favourite shots! I've sneakily turned off Sam's headtorch in this shot as it was casting too much light on the creature...