Noah Cyrus releases video made entirely from the game Dreams
Last Tuesday (28), pop singer Noah Cyrus (Miley Cyrus' younger sister) released a new clip for July - one of her biggest hits - but with a very special difference: the entire clip was developed within the game. Dreams, for PlayStation 4.
In case you've never heard of it, Dreams is a title developed by Media Molecule for the PlayStation 4 that serves not only as a game in itself, but as a game creation system where users can create their own games and test them. In our review of the game, we think it is a unique experience that you won't find anything like it on any other console.
The partnership between Noah and Media Molecule is part of the initiative OneSony, which aims to bring together artists and creators from the different divisions of the company in order to create unique works of art that would not exist without this type of collaboration. In this case, Noah Cyrus is a singer who has a contract with Sony Music, while Media Molecule is a subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studio.
How July came to life in Dreams
According to Kareem Ettouney, art director of Dreams and one of the founders of Media Molecule, July was chosen as the song for this partnership not only because it was a folk ballad that everyone in the company enjoyed listening to, but because it was a song about conflict. internals that the team thought would be very interesting to explore visually with the game's tools.
Originally, the project was supposed to be a mix of recordings of Noah singing with footage generated within Dreams, but the pandemic of the new coronavirus forced the company to rethink the entire project, which ended up becoming a creation made entirely within the game and in a remote collaborative way, with all the artists and designers working from their own homes.
Because it was all developed within Dreams, this means that none of the designers had access to the tools they often use to create art — like a computer mouse or a graphics tablet. All artistic content in the video was developed using only PlayStation 4 controllers (both the traditional Dualshock 4 and PlayStation Move, which is the gesture-based PS4 controller).
As the team could no longer count on Noah Cyrus popping into the studio to record her participation in the clip, the team decided to replace the artist's visual presence with some statues that would act as her representation in the clip. Therefore, the Media Molecule team was inspired by several photos of the singer to develop statues that were as similar as possible to the artist's features, achieving an impressive result for something that was made only with PS4 controllers.
The end result of all this project you can see in the video below, which clearly shows the power of Dreams to develop any type of project in 3D using a video game console (something that is much cheaper than a computer capable of running programs capable of of rendering 3D images in real time), and can help democratize teaching 3D modeling for game development.
And, if you are more interested in knowing how was the whole process of developing this clip in a remote collaborative way and without the physical presence of the singer, Sony has also published a making-of video that goes into more detail about the entire process for clip creation:
And if you have fallen in love with this type of creation and are interested in knowing more projects that were developed within the game, you can take a look at our list of 10 Most Amazing Creations Ever Made in Dreams.
Source: PlayStation Blog
