Painting Cian. part 1 March 7, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Anki things, Drawings.Tags: gravity unlimited, OPIM, consept art, Cian, painting
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So I decided to color something, and since I guessed that most in my class colored in Photoshop, I decided to do something different.
I am taking on the task of painting my picture of Cian on real canvas, this is just a small task so I will have more to show off at the end of the year.
Just to be warned, I don’t have any camera, and I can’t scan the canvas, so I have to use my cellphone for the screenshot, so it is a little blurry, and I haven’t gotten further than the clothes yet XD.
I’m going to continue painting during the weekend ^.^ I will post the progress.
Gravity Unlimited: gameplay and story March 3, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Anki things, Anki's thoughts.Tags: gravity unlimited, OPIM, consept art, Cian, Ryuunosuke, gameplay, story
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This is also the answer on a comment from Amanda=)
Acctually I found both names on a site for baby names=)
http://www.babynamesworld.com/
I tend to use sites like that when comming up with names, or I just tend to use the names I have used before. I didn’t use the names for culture really, just to find names that could mean something according to the character.
The reason Ryuunosuke’s face is crumbling is that he is unlike the others, it started happening before he found Cian. While the others is content with the life they lead, Ryuunosuke is curious to know if there is more outside the barrier of their town, and it is his curiosity that leads him to find the sleeping Cian.
Ryuunosuke reaches for a identity more than the others, and the more he reach, the more it is reganied, something that makes him a outsider for the others, but not for Cian who also want to know where he came from.
And even though Cian and Ryuunosuke don’t know, their pasts are linked together.
The lord of that world is the one who feared dying, and he saw that his only way out was to retreat completely into a shell. His fear mixed with his powers created a mental prison for himself and the people around him, creating the world where none other than he himself remembers what once happened. But what is left of him is just a darkened spirit, that would rather take everyone down with himself than to die alone.
But when the crumbling world was created, he split into two, the other part contaning the purer side of him. This part is the Cian the player controls, the innocent mind that don’t remember anything of what he once were.
And as the other one tries to forget all that had happened in the past, the unknowing part tries to wake it all up again by remembering, resulting in the crumbling of the world speeding up.
There is a person in the story that can be looked at as a phenomenon, the woman that I drew in the picture of the inside of the castle. She is a mystery to even the Lord, he does not know where she is from.
But she is the giant bird that acts as that world’s sun. At day time she lights the world, and at night she wander it in the form of a woman, searching for a way in entering the castle.
She is a reaper, come to claim the soul of the lord, who has escaped it for too long, and taken so many with him into his own madness.
I look at the events of this game to be more like part for part, you start of as Ryuunosuke leaves the shield to search for answers in the old mansion outside their town. Here he will have to fight of creatures that has set up nests there, and by accident he falls trough the floor, finding the sleeping Cian. That he wakes up by making too much noise when falling.
After this there is a time with Cian slowly getting accepted into the town, people understanding that his magic powers can help them keep the creatures that now knew they were there away.
Then Cian wants to know where he is from, and curiosity drives him to the castle at the other side of the gravity force between the worlds.
It is from this point that the game gets more serious, he and Ryuunosuke is caught in the gravity field, but for some reason wakes up unhurt at the other side. From here they have to enter the castle, and each floor holds the memories of the lord, and Cian starts to slowly understand that it is his memories also.
Rooms decorated with the sins and feelings of a tyrant with no compassion for others, memories that holds nothing but pain, hate and fear.
Each room allows the player to enter a new world, living trough parts of the memories and sometimes you can make them lighter. Instead of Cian living trough what the lord once went trough, he can make his own reality, and make a bright future for himself and his new friends.
But if you don’t succeed in making things better, you might get a different ending.
In between you can also enter the small town again, and do various small quests for the village people, that will be rewarded in items, or things you can use later to clear one of the stages in a better way to gain better memories.
At the end a lot happens, Ryuunosuke’s mask is destroyed, Cian will be able to choose which memories he will keep, and the battle against the Lord is of course the last boss fight.
And how it all ends, is decided by how good memories you were able to make for Cian.
I will think over conditions for making bright memories for the next post=)
2nd try at the character designs March 1, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Anki things, Anki's thoughts, Drawings.Tags: gravity unlimited, OPIM, consept art, Cian, Ryuunosuke
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I have tried on the character designs for the second time. I decided to make the lead character a little older than I first intended too, since I don’t think the rest would make any sense if he were to young.
I found names for the two lead characters, and I am working on writing the story, and also on adding a bad guy. Since there is no good games without least one bad guy to help the plot thicken.
2nd try on Cian (Ancient):
Even thou I made him older, he still seems a little like a kid, but that is intended. As one is dark, a younger part can also represent the light from the older and darker self, and if you reunite the two parts, you will get a whole person, with both light and dark.
2nd try on Ryuunosuke (Dragon shell):
Ryuunosuke is one of the faceless ones, and what makes him different from the rest is that his mask is crumbling, and that is looked at as a disfigurement by the others, as they have never seen a face before. The faceless ones have masks as their face, some have of stone, some of diamond, and things like that, and most of them end up drawing on the surface, in the depths of their mind reaching out for the a identity long lost.
They live in the safest part of the crumbling world, the gravity bridge between them and the dark castle at the other side and a shield made by the lord of the castle keeping their town from getting dragged into the gravity field.
But it all slowly changes, as Ryuunosuke finds Cian, waking him up from a slumber the lord of the castle once put him into.
A world bound by fear, and destroyed by memories February 20, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Anki's thoughts.2 comments
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
H. P. Lovecraft.
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Fear is a power that is can be stronger than any other human emotion, when we stand before something we fear, we can be unable to move, unable to even breath. Hearts can be stopped by fear and people can change into someone entierly different.
We go to movies to be scared, it is a fear that most of us can handle, some of us even like it, finding amusment when others are scared. We feel mighty when someone is scared of something we aren’t scared of. If you have a friend afraid of spiders, you might even use that to scare that person, not thinking much about what fear can do to people that feel it.
Some people might even be so afraid that they can’t move out of their house, they might not know just what they are afraid of, it is just something in their mind that won’t let them face the outside world. They can’t handle their fear…
But there is a fear that most of us share, that is with us all our life:
The fear of dying.
We see movies and read books about people who fear dying, we hear about people who wish to stay young forever, afraid of becoming old and to whiter away.
Then imagine, if someone could be consumed with this fear, forgetting everything around as it grew to something greater, a power enough to consume your own life and all those close to you.
But to never die is just an illusion, you will be safe for a little while, then when you are consumed in the darkness, slowly forgetting why you came there in the first place, you will soon forget your fear, and as you do, the darkness will be lifted and the world you created for yourself will fade.
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This is the idea I have for the ‘Gravity Unlimited’ game I am going to make the concept for. A world created by the fear of dying, a gravity field pulling it hard apart as the person who feared death starts forgetting who he is and why he once feared it.
Fear keeps the world together, real or not, it is able to keep the creatures there alive, but as you go trough the game, and the lead character remembers who he once were, the world starts to crumble and fade.
The field that eats the world apart is the bridge that makes up the path to the other side where the character have to go to find out about himself. There he is lead to a strange castle by a woman dressed in a kimono (Japanese clothing). Inside the castle he stumbles upon rooms where the next is worse than the one before, each of them designed and molded to the memories that each room will grant him before he advances to the next floor.
One of the last rooms in the castle, the woman in kimono following slowly after the lead character as he advances to the next floor. This room shows suffering, the bodies that makes up some of the trees, the hand and foot in the water and the head trying to hold unto the branches of the tree. And from above, the eye of the past keeping an eye of all that is happening, the last source of the terrible fear not able to look away from the past.
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Hehe, Hope I am not going to much away from the main point of the name ‘gravity unlimited’. It is just so fun to make stories with some of the story more in the mind than on the body.
*Shudder*Remakes*Shudder* February 8, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Anki's thoughts.Tags: american, chakushin ari, japanese, ju on, kairo, kayako, mimiko, one missed call, pulse, remakes, ringu, sadako, the eye, the grudge, the ring
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I look at myself as a person that can take anything, I love horror movies, and as long as there is a good story and things like that, I can even watch the worst B movies. I don’t scare easy anymore, and I love ghost movies with a facination, but there is one thing that still scares the shit out of me:
The bad american remakes!
When I first watched ‘the Ring’ I thought it was a good movie, since I didn’t know better. But after watching the original ‘Ringu’ I understood how much better it was, the story had a more eerie feeling to it, and I felt more facinated by it all. I quickly watched the second and third ‘Ringu’ movie, and it got even better, in the third movie, that is called ‘Ringu 0 – birthday’, you get to see how Sadako herself became one of the most feared ghosts in Japan. (I cheered for her, not the stupid people that were mean to her).
But another thing that bothers me with ‘the Ring’ is that they probably didn’t even read the book before they started, they just copied the japanese movie, they could have made their own version with the elements of the book, the truth about Sadako that even the japanese movies didn’t put in, or to set the right cast. (In the book, the lead character is male, and his wife is stupid enough to set on the movie for herself and their daughter.)
I am also quite pissed over the second american movie… (If you haven’t see it, don’t read past this) Why does the americans have to make a end where they can even find ways to get writh of ghosts? At least the japanese movies pointed out that humans can’t kill spirits, and isn’t the movies called Ring because it is never ending?
Then over to the next remake! Dark water… another of Koji Suzuki’s wonderful books (He is the author of the ‘Ringu’ books.) I watched the original long before the american version came, and it is a movie that makes me want to cry at times, and at the same time it is wonderfully creepy. And what did the americans do to it? They made it into a dramatic nightmare, not even the ghost seemed to have screen time here. It was just a horrible movie that didn’t even leave an expression.
Then we come to one movie that they acctually did right, I loved ‘the grudge’ and also how they managed to keep the Japanese feeling of it all. It was smart to film it in Japan, and to keep the old director =) even the ghosts are the same, Kayako and her little Bake-neko son. ‘Ju-on’ started as a mini series for TV, and since it was so well recieved, they made it into two Japanese movies. The america came and made two more, the first is a remake of the first japanese movie, but the second is a continuation that the japanese didn’t have, but I think it was ok, even with american actors you can still just look at it as another movie where Kayako kicks ass=)
I’m not done yet! Now we come to the movie ‘Kairo’ that had it’s american remake too, ‘Pulse’. The japanese version is set up so we follow two person’s stories, and they meet at the end and try to leave together. I don’t really remember how the american went… but I know that they rely to much on the scary monster effect, just like with Sadako (Or Samara…) they showed a grizzly face that had rottet… the japanese director knows that what you don’t see is scarier… like how Sadako always hides her face behind her hair, and all you can see is the creepy eye looking at you… In kairo you don’t see much of the ghosts, and you never really know where they came from. But in the american movie they made a lot of special effects to scare people, but they went to far away from the original concept, and I don’t think they had the same terrifying ending as the japanese.
Then we come to the end for now, as I am getting over my rage for a little while. (Only until they come with the remake of the scary chinese movie ‘the eye’.)
One missed call or Chakushin Ari, I am a fan of the movies and the TV serie that was made for it a little while ago (10 ep) But I just watched the american version… I wanted to cry… out of frustration. It didn’t even make any sense! People see ghosts all over the place when they have the call, why the hell do they do that? They should just see Mimiko or her mother… and the call tone is to dead, it didn’t even frighten me, at least the old one made me remember it!
I could go on forever, but instead I will stop here, and wait with fear for the remake of the eye, and the dreaded American movie version of the ‘fatal frame’ games…
Mononoke February 3, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Anime, Drawings.4 comments
I got bored in the weekend, and decided to watch a lot of anime, I started with finishing Code Geass… and I will hate myself forever for doing that! (Watch and understand…) after that I didn’t really know what to do, I were downloading other animes, but couldn’t quite find something really interesting to watch.
Then, after I had tried to start on Onegai twins (Continuation of Onegai Teacher) I tried Mononoke (Not the Ghibli movie! That is Princess Mononoke) I love japanese ghost stories and all their wonderful creatures, so I loved the anime, and I loved the art style, as it is a mix of a stylized feudal Japan, and Art Nouveau styles.
Anyway, Mononoke is a spin-off of the “Bakeneko” arc from the anthology series Ayakashi, a anime that based on various Japanese ghost stories, the anime Mononoke is mostly the same, it unfolds around a medicine seller, who seems to mysteriously appear anywhere there is a Mononoke (Japanese demon or ghost) with a grudge against humans.
He carries with him a case he claims to hold medicines, but he also have a great amount of children toy weights (He uses them to know where the Mononoke is) many things you really can’t see what is, and some old and questionable japanese books. His most treasured belonging is a sword, that he can only use when he knows three things about the Mononoke, the shape (Katachi), truth (Makoto) and regret (Kotowari) behind why it has gone from a ghost to a demon. When he has all these, he can fight them, changing into another and stronger being.
Bakeneko is the first creature he fights in the Ayakashi, it is a cat monster that has grown into something that can kill because the woman that had taken care of it had been brutally killed by a man that kidnaped her before her wedding. When it comes to Japanese ghosts and spirits, the feeling they have when they die can decided what is to come for them, if they die with a terrible rage, that rage can turn into a curse against all humans in general, or just the people that caused the rage. Mononoke is creatures that feed on these human emotions, from living or dead humans, they can use it to get stronger.
If you want to know more about Japanese ghosts and spirits, this site has a lot :
http://www.obakemono.com/index.php
And I can’t talk about interesting anime design without showing pictures, here is some pictures I took from the anime, nothing of this belongs to me, it was made by Toei animation and Kenji Nakamura.
The medicine seller:
With sword released:
I could of course post pictures of the scenery too, but there is too much weird sceneries to choose from…
Another thing with this anime that is really gnawing at my nerves… You never get to know anything about the medicine seller, just that he sells medicines and has a morbid sense of humor… not even his name is given though the anime. But one thing is quite clear, even thou he can be seen by humans and appear human, he clearly isn’t human. He has long elf like ears, fangs and at the three last episodes of the series, a great time has gone by, yet he hasn’t aged at all.
I recomend this anime to everyone=) And I also post a picture I drew today, I will try to color it on photoshop later.
Youtube user February 1, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Anki things.add a comment
I am a person that likes to make music videos when I have the material and the chance for it, and like many others, my domain is Anime music videos.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ankichan is my site on youtube, and you won’t find anything else than music videos there. Some of the series that I have made of is xxxholic and Tsubasa by clamp, Trinity blood, bleach and a lot of Kingdom hearts…
Series: Bleach
Song: Soul Society – Kamelot
this is the first one I posted, it was a few years ago and I really never had any special thoughts about the video. But it seems to be one of the most popular I have…
Views: 45,086 Comments: 73 Favorited: 375 times
stats never lie… peopled loved it more than me.
Series: Trinity Blood
Song: Amazing – Aerosmith
I love the anime Trinity Blood, the series are based on a science fiction book series. It involves vampires and it is 900 years after armageddon. The humans and vampires share earth, but they don’t get along, and at the Vatican side of the fight, there is a being that feeds on the blood of vampires. If you don’t like anime, at least get the books=) They are comming out in english now.
Views: 4,291 Comments: 13 Favorited: 39 times
Series: xxxholic
Song: Time is running out – Muse
I love this one, the song so match the half mad personality of Watanuki (The one with glasses and a frustrated face) It is from both the movie and the anime, and I so look forward to the second season of the anime, and I hope they will have in the main story this time=)
Views: 1,322 Comments: 12 Favorited: 32 times
Gravity Unlimited January 31, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Uncategorized.Tags: gravity unlimited
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We got a task at school, where from the title ‘Gravity unlimited’, we was to make the concept art for a product, I decided that I wanted to make a fantasy game about a world with low gravity and flying creatures.
I started thinkning about the idea in class, and as Amanda, our teacher, asked me to explain a little about my idea, I started imagening more about it, and when she questioned me, I started trying to draw what I imagined. I know it isn’t the final outcast for the world, but it is a start, I imagine a kind of floating world, maybe some stones or something flying up from under, as the world slowly decaes from the other side.
Of course there is something that holds the world where it is, like a giant mirror or crystal that serves as a portal to the real world. The word isn’t big, maybe just a hill with a castle on, and some forest or something around, the story will start in the castle.
1st. outcast to the ‘gravity unlimited’ world:
But even thou the world is important, the characters are as important, I didn’t really think much over the characters before I got this crazy idea last night, I kind of imagined a kid sitting on a robot’s shoulder. The robot being the only thing that kept the young boy from flying off, I wondered about how this robot could do that at first, it could be because of it being made of metal and by that being heavier than the boy, or I could think of something that held him to the ground, I decided to give the robot claws, that he could claw unto the ground with.
1st. outcast to the character design:
One of the things I am going to put weight on in this task is the story of the game, the game starts in the dungeons of the castle, where the boy is kept imprisoned, he don’t know why he is there, or who he is. He is wealthy dressed, and for some reason he knows of magic.
The story starts as he somehow gains the trust of one of the guards, a robot creature that is almost broken, and looked down at by the other creatures in the castle. His feet is claws, his hands are blades and one of his wings are thorn off, but the most special about him is the mask on his face, it cracks more and more, what will happen if it crack?
You use the robot to get around, fighting close combat with his swords and you can use the boys magic to fight creatures that fly. The robot can fly a little with his one wing, but if he let go of the ground for too long, he can be pulled away.
A curse is put on that world, so everything is pulled up towards something hidden in the darkness above them, only the flying creatures there able to keep from getting sucked into it.
Well, this is what I have planned so far, will probably write a story for it later=)
My first ever blog=) January 31, 2008
Posted by ankichan in Anki's thoughts.Tags: anki, newblog
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I haven’t written a blog before, and my english might suck… but I will do my best in posting my work here, and writing down my crazy ideas about everything and nothing.
I like drawing, but I also love writing a lot, so I might post some of my stories here if I feel like it.
I’m a big fan of anime and manga, so expect a lot of reviews of the series I watch, maybe people want to talk about anime and manga with me if we share the same favorite series=)
Anyway, please be nice to me ^.^
