November 9, 2009
FATALE Now Available on Steam
FATALE is now available via Steam
for $7
"We can only express admiration for
Valve’s willingness to distribute our work to the gaming audience," say Tale of
Tales’ directors Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. "We know very well that FATALE
is a difficult piece for those expecting a conventional game. But we believe it
is experiments like this that help the medium forward. And by supporting them,
Valve expresses a solid belief in the wide open future of computer games."
In the passionate debate that
quickly erupted after the release of FATALE last month, one would almost forget
the hard work that was done to bring the piece into existence in only four
months. After highlighting the amazing character work by Takayoshi Sato, the
chilling voice acting of Jarboe and the sublime sound design by Kris Force, it
is time to pay homage to the creators of the focal point of FATALE’s narrative:
Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils.
Today, Tale of Tales releases a
video clip entitled "The Making of the Dance of the Seven Veils".
http://Tale-of-Tales.com/Fatale/dance.html
From the musical composition and
performance of Gerry De Mol over the improvised choreography of Eléonore Valere
Lachky to Laura Raines Smith’s painstaking effort to animate 4750 frames by
hand, the clip shows how music, dance, video, animation and realtime rendering
and scripting come together to deliver a performance unique to the medium.
"We had always wanted to do
something with contemporary dance in realtime 3D," designers Auriea Harvey and
Michael Samyn explain. "Some of the world’s most important choreographers and
dancers live in our tiny kingdom of Belgium. We regularly go see their
astounding work on stage. The obvious choice for committing this talent to the
digital medium would have been motion capture. But such a costly process was out
of the question for a small independent production like FATALE. Luckily we had
woman on our team who was mad enough to recreate the animation by hand based on
video recorded of a dancer’s improvisations." "Mostly it was masochism and
Advil," jokes Tale of Tales’ lead animator Laura Raines Smith.
Tale of Tales is an independent game
development studio run by Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn out of Gent, Belgium.
The goal of Tale of Tales is to help videogames expand to a medium that can
rival all others in terms of diversity and depth. As a result, their work tends
to be experimental and often causes great controversy. FATALE was created by a
team of 8 in a period of 4 months and released on 5 October 2009. Production of
FATALE was supported by Flanders Audiovisual Fund.
