Game Art: Jacky Connolly's Hudson Valley Ruins (2016)

Hudson Valley Ruins, Connelly's new, ambitious machinima created with The Sims, i

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Full description below:

Depicting various domestic spheres of a suburban north American context, Hudson Valley Ruins is a machinima video that relies on The Sims 3 computer graphics engine to depict the absurd, alienated, and often uncanny lives of several characters, focusing on two young girls and their visions, experiences, and fantasies.

According to the artist

The film’s narrative structure was inspired by works of Hollywood hyperlink cinema such as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) and David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars (2014). The virtual animated characters are seen in a series of parallel vignettes that depict their loneliness, alienation, and eventual flight into fantasy, culminating in a natural disaster. The characters do not speak, and the significant moments of action are highlighted through pantomime, gesture, and the ever-present weather sounds of the world in which they reside. The iterative and algorithmic processes of the game that are captured (such as idle breathing loops, swaying trees, the cycle from sunrise to sunset, and weather patterns) are as significant to the film's meaning as the mysterious story that unfolds. I wanted to blend moments of familiar narrative with more fragmented, uncanny instances. The final narrative was largely dictated by a metonymical use of sound (dogs baying, a cockatiel screaming, wind and thunder).

Here's an excerpt:

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