Template:Infobox crew Edouard Caplain is a French concept artist and illustrator working at DONTNOD Entertainment since October 2012. Next to his work on DONTNOD's first game, Remember Me, Caplain was heavily involved in the pre-production and visual development of the studio's second game, Life is Strange, as one of the main concept artists, and influenced the aesthetics of the game greatly.[1] He is currently working on Dontnod's second season of Life is Strange and also worked on the stand-alone precursor game The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit.
Career
The first project Caplain worked on as a concept artist was a game called The Outsider at the British studio Frontier Developments in 2008, but the game got cancelled before release. Later on, he moved to London to work on his second project, a game called WarDevil: Unleash the Beast Within at Digi-Guys before going off to join the Creative Assembly to work on Alien: Isolation, a project Caplain is very proud to have been a part of. Two years later he moved back to Paris and started to work at Dontnod Entertainment.[1]
Work on Life is Strange
Life is Strange is the first game Caplain worked on from start to finish, over the span of three years.
Personal Life
Caplain has always loved drawing. He enjoys bringing his own ideas to life, but he also likes to work in a team since it gives you the opportunity to share your work with other artists regularly and get their feedback.[1]
"Working in a team and having the opportunity to share your work with other artists every day as well as seeing how excited the 3-D team gets when you get something right is all very fulfilling."
Concept Art
![Concept art for a cut scene in "Polarized"[2]](/wiki/File:Edouard-caplain-bus-impact-hd.jpg "Edouard-caplain-bus-impact-hd.jpg (428 KB)")
![Janitor office, location not used ingame[3]](/wiki/File:Janitor_office.jpg "Janitor office.jpg (62 KB)")
Other Illustrations
Quick Sketches
The following images are a set of quick sketches that were made before painting:[4]
Storyboard
The following images were shown to Square Enix early on to explain the gameplay in Life is Strange:[5]
Trivia
- Edouard Caplain is the creator and designer of Hawt Dawg Man from Life is Strange.[6]
- When designing the Blackwell Academy, Caplain conducted research on schools in Oregon around 1910, the year Blackwell Academy was founded, aiming for a design true to reality. He researched on what schools looked like at that time, their architecture, the materials that were used to build them as well as what kinds of trees populated their campus.[1]
- As evident from Edouard Caplain's Twitter posts, he played Life is Strange himself and really likes the game's protagonist Max. He also showed interest in playing the Japanese edition.
- It is interesting to note that contrary to the usual role of concept artists in video games (creating art material which will help guide the general art direction during the production of a game), Caplain's art style directly inspired the graphics of Life is Strange; the developers found the art style so interesting that they tried to recreate it as faithfully as possible in 3D. It explains why the concept arts and the game itself look so similar.[7]
Interviews and Articles
- The Artist behind Life is Strange (March 3, 2016)
- Edouard Caplain on the Art behind Life is Strange (February 9, 2016)
- The Art Of Life Is Strange (January 28, 2016)
- Life is Strange: Art of Environment Storytelling (January 27, 2016)
Videos
External Links
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Edouard Caplain on the Art Behind Life Is Strange (February 9, 2016)
- ↑ For more information, see here.
- ↑ Edouard Caplain's Twitter post
- ↑ Original Twitter posts found here and here
- ↑ Original Twitter post found here
- ↑ (insert twitter post as reference)
- ↑ MasterClass with Michel Koch (sequence starting at 1:14:00)