BAF: Viktor Antonov

The second speaker of the day was Viktor Antonov, design director of Zenimax Media. His talk was focused on cities and how he feels they are often the main character's of games, as they should evoke atmosphere and portray the cultural, and social aspects of the world through architecture and attention to detail.

"Like biological creatures cities have a skeleton." By this Antonov is describing how the pattern is the fist step of designing a city. The roads and basic building shaped come first from a birds eye view.

"New York is very geometric and angular, but if you look down on it like a map its a mess of buildings and roads, billboards and traffic." this shows how to design a realistic city to be so complex, by drawing the road and street patterns first to buildings can be built around them and the city starts to take shape. His work on the Dishonored city Dunwall was inspired by London and Edinburgh between the late 1800's and the early 1900's, having a both a very mechanical and organic look, and hence the long river.

When designing this city, it was orgionally going to be set in Japan, but after deciding that they didn't like this idea they contacted Antonov who liked the idea of London, as it was famous for shadowy figures in the alleyways during this time period, such as Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd and Sherlock Holmes. He also liked that it wasn't American, and it was just an island often not associated with the rest of Europe. Its independence, loneliness and personality attracted him to the city. He looked at the essence and soul of London, designing horse and chariot's, castles, whale hunting ships and imposing police booths to bith a very London vibe. He also lit the city with spotlights to give it harsh shadows and contrasts like Hugh Ferris' work.

Hugh Ferris' 1920's architecture arguably inspired most modern cities, and certainly many comic book based cities like Megacity (Judge Dredd) and Gotham (Batman,) and cinematic cities like Blade Runner. He used charcoal and an eraser to create black and white, highly contrasted and atmospheric cities.

He wrote a book 'The Metropolis of Tomorrow' in 1929 that he highly advised.