RELEASE: AR3NA (2022)
Today is December 15th, 2022. Today is the day. AR3NA is finally being released. It's been a crazy year, but here it finally is: ready to be shared with the world. I can't wait to hear what you think about it. AR3NA will have its premiere at exactly 12.00PM on YouTube. The full film will be released on YouTube, behance and the blog. A shortened version of AR3NA will be featured on Vimeo due to storage constraints on free Vimeo accounts. Since I still wanted to have a release on Vimeo, I decided to create a shorter version of the film for that specific platform
AR3NA (or ARENA) is an experimental machinima and visual study produced by A Pixelated Point of View within the game Quake III Arena (1999) by ID Software. With a production time of almost one full year, this is the first ever longform/feature film project to be released by A Pixelated Point of View.
AR3NA is a visual study about Quake III Arena; its environments and its textures. A deeper critical look at over two-hundred maps that many of us have spent hours in. To frag, to score, to jump. The map is being. The map as 'being' is the outside layer of an onion, serving as the aesthetic layer for all of the nerve-wrecking last moment frags and capture the flag scores that takes place within a vast universe where only the strongest prevail.
AR3NA is antimatter. AR3NA rejects skill and traditional means of gameplay. No power-ups, no weapons and players are found. It is you, your inner thoughts. Inside a world that is empty. Inside a universe that is limitless. The rest is up to you.
Production took place over the course of one full year. Pre-production started in early January. Actual production took place between March and August. Post-Production was concluded early December. Approximately two-hundred maps made for the game Quake III Arena were selected from within the game's vanilla map selection and randomly on the lvlworld map repository. Each map was carefully explored with the help of the Quake III MovieMakers Edition Mod. Shots were created 'on the spot' based on current interpretation and usability of that particular portion of the map. In total, close to a terabyte of TGA sequences were conceived when production concluded and the entire project rounded close to two.
The film was edited by using an approach I'd like to call 'F&I (Feeling and Interpretation), rather than the 'fit to music' style that I'd often employ in other projects where the film was heavily edited to fit the flow of the music. To be more precise: the rough cut of the film was completely edited without any form of audio and primarily through feeling. The length of the shots and the placement of the shots was decided through this approach as well. Once the offline edit was established, it was time for the grading process; which was entirely done in Adobe After Effects through vanilla stock plugins. The main takeaway during grading was to differentiate the maps so that they'd be less recognizable in order to establish a more powerful cinematic experience. This was done with heavy contrasts, hue-changes, noise/grain and sometimes sky replacements/adjustments.
The last step before AR3NA's completion was audio post-production. An extensive music search was conducted inside YouTube's Audio Library and on FreeMusicArchive.org. The main purpose for the audio was to textend the still somewhat flat visual experience by creating a auditive universe through soundscaping in order to make it truly sound and feel like an industrial-based, eerie universe. The soundscape was created by cutting and combining parts from approximately twenty audio tracks. The majority of these were obtained from songs that have been used before in previous projects such as the Regression, IGNIIITION and DEPTHMAP series in order to create a bit of an auditive recognizable leitmotiv that would often reappear over the course of the film.
© A Pixelated Point of View 2009 - 2022
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