Beyond Divinity Peek of the Week #32

The thirty-second installment of RPGVault’s “Peek of the Week” feature for the upcoming Divine Divinity sequel is now available. This time, lead animator Marian Arnold talks about creating the cutscenes for the game. An excerpt:

Swen and Bronthion made a short storyboard to underlay several paintings with voice and gave it to a Belgian artist, Felix Serwir. Two weeks before the gold master, we got the final paintings from him. They were amazingly well done, but somehow a little too cartoon-like – not completely fitting the style of the Divinity universe. In my opinion, there was a rift as big as Bronthion’s belly.

It was my job anyway to put them into a small show-like cutscene to make them work. I suggested to Swen and Andre to frame the images with some dark 3D-scenery to make the stylish link to the game and spice it up. Both of them weren’t really convinced. So the next day, I was completely occupied with collecting Raanaar artwork from the background sceneries Andre had made for Beyond Divinity, setting up a crypt scene and rendering it all out. When all of this was done, I showed the result to Swen, Felix and the other Larian artists. They liked what they saw. And I had proven my point. Well, sometimes you have to win, don’t you? And Lynn came in later and while chatting with Andre, her glance fell on my monitor and she said “Ohhhh, this looks nice!” What more could I ask?