Over the last week I've been carefully balancing working on adding HDR rendering to Rawr along with watching the first and only two seasons of Twin Peaks. It's hard to judge a show like that, on the whole, because while the first, say, sixteen-seventeen episodes are absolutely remarkable in just about every sense, the episodes leading up to the series finale ping pong back-and-forth between awful and passable. What is even more interesting, as an enormous fan of David Lynch, is the pure, focused power that he can have on any episode which he takes a part in. His abilities as a writer are second only to his numerous abilities as a director. There are instances where Lynch clearly conveys an emotion in the scenes he directs to remarkable effect. The viewer reaction to his work are generally polarized in the sense that people either thoroughly dislike or completely love it, but it's hard to deny the man's auteur-like status as a filmmaker.

I believe that it's pretty clear that I take an interest in storytelling in both games, literature, and film, but something that I generally don't discuss all that much is my interest in the power that a visually well-constructed scene can have on a viewer or gamer. One of the reasons that I enjoy the things that directors like Steven Spielberg and David Lynch is that they both possess a very clear and thorough knowledge of what "looks good" for a given scene. For Spielberg, I think this concept is best presented recently in Minority Report and Saving Private Ryan. The use of color is so ingrained into David Lynch's work that it's difficult not to spot it in any given title; he frames a scene using a very specific and carefully-chosen color palette generally set against a very contrasting backdrop to provoke a subtle emotion in the viewers without any action taken on the part of the actors. Just take a look at the image below for an idea:



There is a very definite, consistent color palette that the entire scene draws from all set against a crimson red background atop a very jarring floor pattern. The entirety of the composition, especially in context, has absolutely no soothing qualities about it. Even without the presence of the midget who, for those that haven't seen the show, consistently dances and talks in a spoken-backwards-but-processed-so-it-comes-out-forward-spoken kind of way.

I actually meant to discuss the HDR rendering, but I'll save those details for another post. In the meantime here's a screenshot: