America expanded its territory greatly during the 19th century, and discussions in the country turned toward occupation of the entirety of the continent, including, at one point, a plan under President Polk to take possession of Cuba.Īmericans cited the majesty of the West’s landscape as a major motivating factor for a philosophy that came to be known as Manifest Destiny, a justification for aggressive colonization. government decided that it must not allow European powers to retain a foothold on the continent. The Hudson River School’s output served a propagandistic function in the aftermath of the War of 1812, when the U.S. The Romantics further solidified the artistic validity of landscape painting, and set the stage for later artists to make names for themselves. This would lay the foundations for the Romantics, who used the wonder of the natural tableau for various symbolic purposes. Landscape painting was considered beneath fine art and proper culture in the West until it was largely legitimized by artists like Rembrandt in the 17th century, who took the practice from a lark or work for apprentices to something more widely appreciated by patrons and the public. In my opinion, that’s not where Red Dead Redemption 2’s painterly influences stop, but it’s a great place to begin. Owen Shepherd, our lighting director, looked to the pastoral and landscape painters like Turner, Rembrandt and American landscape painters from the 19th century such as Albert Bierstadt, Frank Johnson, and Charles Russell.” However, there were certain areas like lighting where there were some direct inspirations. “ looked to reality, we looked to the places that we were riffing from. But there are other ways of creating an image, and Garbut’s explanation of Red Dead Redemption 2’s philosophy of lighting, well, paints a picture, if you’ll pardon the expression. Cameras and photographs are just one way of seeing the world, a way that in so many regards does not reflect the way that we see. From the gusts of wind blowing through the grasslands, to the clouds scudding around the mountain tops casting shadows on the plains below, the atmosphere is a complete inter-connected system.” “Since the connection between sky and landscape so important to us,” Garbut said, “we wanted to get away from the old methods of atmosphere rendering, where there was a theatrical layering between the world and the sky, and to make it something much more tangible, so the player can almost feel the wind, rain, and mist on their face as they ride across the landscapes. Some of this may be a byproduct of a desire to establish a sense of literal atmosphere within the game’s Western setting. It’s an interesting statement, though, because in so many ways, Red Dead Redemption 2 seems more clearly inspired by a particular period of fine art than any game I’ve ever seen.Įditors Note: We’ve added a video where we further explore Red Dead Redemption 2’ s connection to the Hudson River School of Art, including an interview with Wendy Ikemoto, Associate curator of American Art at the New York Historical Society. Numerous systems in our lighting, cameras, weather and time of day come together with the player’s actions and the world and characters we have built to create something unique and constantly changing.” We are not building a passive experience. “We were building a place, not a linear or static representation, so while in the past we had looked to both, it no longer seemed as necessary or relevant. “Generally we were not looking to film or art for inspiration,” Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut told me via email.
However, it’s long been clear that Rockstar Games wants Red Dead Redemption 2 to stand apart from its contemporaries with regard to its presentation - assuming, that is, the studio considers other games its contemporaries. For years, color grading has been an aggressive solution to a coherent visual presentation in games, mimicking the style of films from visually oriented directors like Tony Scott and Ridley Scott. Bokeh-based depth of field, which emulates not just the behavior of a lens but the shape of its aperture blades, is often a measure of how advanced a game engine’s visual feature set is. Video games live in a world of cameras and cinematic terms, where the goal over the last decade has been an emulation of film and optical technology.