FATALE is now available via Steam, for $7 US Dollars."We can only express admiration for Valve's willingness to distribute our work to the gaming audience," say Tale of Tales' directors Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. "We know very well that FATALE is a difficult piece for those expecting a conventional game. But we believe it is experiments like this that help the medium forward. And by supporting them, Valve expresses a solid belief in the wide open future of computer games."
The Making of The Dance of The Seven Veils from Tale of Tales on Vimeo.
In the passionate debate that quickly erupted after the release of FATALE last month, one would almost forget the hard work that was done to bring the piece into existence in only four months. After highlighting the amazing character work by Takayoshi Sato, the chilling voice acting of Jarboe and the sublime sound design by Kris Force, it is time to pay homage to the creators of the focal point of FATALE's narrative: Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils.
Today, Tale of Tales releases a video clip entitled "The Making of the Dance of the Seven Veils".
From the musical composition and performance of Gerry De Mol over the improvised choreography of Eléonore Valere Lachky to Laura Raines Smith's painstaking effort to animate 4750 frames by hand, the clip shows how music, dance, video, animation and realtime rendering and scripting come together to deliver a performance unique to the medium.
"We had always wanted to do something with contemporary dance in realtime 3D," designers Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn explain. "Some of the world's most important choreographers and dancers live in our tiny kingdom of Belgium. We regularly go see their astounding work on stage. The obvious choice for committing this talent to the digital medium would have been motion capture. But such a costly process was out of the question for a small independent production like FATALE. Luckily we had woman on our team who was mad enough to recreate the animation by hand based on video recorded of a dancer's improvisations." "Mostly it was masochism and Advil," jokes Tale of Tales' lead animator Laura Raines Smith.
Tale of Tales is an independent game development studio run by Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn out of Gent, Belgium. The goal of Tale of Tales is to help videogames expand to a medium that can rival all others in terms of diversity and depth. As a result, their work tends to be experimental and often causes great controversy. FATALE was created by a team of 8 in a period of 4 months and released on 5 October 2009. Production of FATALE was supported by Flanders Audiovisual Fund.