Blending Historical and Virtual Photography
After 10 years of Virtual Photography, I learned that after spending about 30 hours into their story, mood and world, some games call for the artist inside you.
In early 2021, I was capturing a very casual gallery of Ghost Of Tsushima when I tried to tackle the “tintype” filter with more focus and intention than usual. While doing so, I noticed that under specific lighting conditions, contrast and time of the day, Tintype was just a modern take on the classic “sepia” filter.
This was suddenly becoming exciting for me, because Ghost Of Tsushima actually relies a lot on bright colors and contrast of hues to deliver its art style and in that very moment I realized I was in fact playing against the game’s own rules and artistic direction. Usually, when this happens, very interesting things happen in my production.
As a matter of fact, my first 4 tintype-filtered screenshots really weren’t reminding me of the game I was playing in that moment. They were reminding me of the old photographs I used too see at my grandparents house or hanging from old local restaurants walls. I’m talking about real -classic- historical photography, and while staring at my first 4 sepia captures my mind was immediately thrown back to IRL feudal japan thanks to the incredibly realistic faces and costumes sported by all the main characters and NPCs of the game.
These are not my actual grandparents, but you got the idea
As a Virtual Photographer I am supposed to be also a creative person. So the next step in the creative process was asking myself: “do I have something here? And if I actually have something here, can I build a project so wide and huge in scope that has been rarely seen in Virtual Photography?”
The challenge was accepted, and the final project was in fact to use Virtual Photography as a tool and Ghost Of Tsushima as a blank canvas to reproduce historical photography as we use to know it.
I portraied the NPCs’ of Sucker Punch wonderful act as if I was a photoreporter sent back in time in feudal Japan. I captured virtual people in virtual environments just like they were real people of medieval Japan living their everyday life woking in the fields, cleaning horses, forging weapons and praying.
Soon I realized I had to build-up some rules for the sake of consistency and long-term quality so I created this to-do list:
Remove every single refence to the characters, the story and the stylish action of the game to give the audience a sense of “real medieval Japan”
Use just one filter (“Tintype”)
Use just one ratio (9:16)
Focus on people as much as possible. Historical photography is made by people, dresses, hairstiles, looks
Mix long, medium and short range portraits to increase variety as much as possible
Here you can enjoy the final result of my project.
But at this point it still wasn’t over. One of my friends at Neoludica told me that my screenshot really reminded him of the works of italian IRL photographers Felice Beato and Adolfo Farsari:
So I told myself: can I push this project a little bit further and manually and artificially recolor of of my screenshots? Of course I did! Very poorly -actually- since my skills at post-processing are non-existent, but I did it anyway using very soft and pastel colors that could remind of IRL recolored historical photos:
