Debris vs Suicide Barbie (By Magic of Nah-Kolor)
At Breakpoint 2007 two very very nice productions saw the light of day. Debris by Farbrausch on the PC platform and Suicide Barbie by TBL at the PSP. This article will show you where the makers could have gotten some inspiration for their productions.
For a review of Debris see the review elsewhere in Hugi done by Adok. Suicide Barbie is a TBL production based on, well, Barbie :) If you have not seen it yet you can download it from this link. The demo features women, beer and guns - a sure winner :)
Anyway when you have seen both you will understand this article better. Everybody gets their ideas or motivation from somewhere. In the case of Debris check out this link or see the illustrations in this article. For example Panic Room or Mayfield. Fiver2 of Farbrausch commented this about his 'inspiration' for Debris on pouet.net:
Fiver2: "Wow. Thanks a lot for all this scarily incredible feedback. There have been lots of comments about possible influences of films and videos, so maybe I can add something to this. Dark City is obvious. Then there's of course Panic Room, and some Spiderman 2. And the fish swarms in Deep Blue (I guess that film was also responsible for a certain scene in Starstruck ;). Also Koyanisqatsi was very important to what I seek for in achieving with a demo in general. I haven't seen Final Fantasy VII the movie or Metropolis (the anime), though (but I think I should do so). Nobody has mentioned Radiohead's 'go to sleep' by Alex Rutterford (also director of the incredible Gantz Graf video), yet. Also very obviously the 3.7 billion movies and tv-series with shaky handcamera influenced my camera work and i think there's also some Christo in Debris. I had the worst moment when about one year ago I bought 'onedotzero_select dvd4' as it contained the brillant music-video to airs 'electronic performers'. It also contained another video: 'Sometimes' by Pleix (it is linked somewhere above). When i saw it i just thought "Damn. That's just what I had in mind for Debris. Only better." Since then I force everybody to see that video. The second moment of "Omg. - they 'stole' my idea before I could use it myself" was when I saw X-Men 3 and they had a giant moving bridge in it. Same as with the Pleix video I loved and hated it at the same time. But the most important influence probably was living in a city. During the last two years whenever i was walking through Hamburg I imagined rotating houses, moving objects, diving bridges, crushing streets. Waiting for a train can be quite entertaining that way ;) Also visiting L.A. had its influence on Debris. (You might even recognize some buildings.) One bridge was taken from the White Stripes' 'The hardest button to button'. Two more incidents were quite influencial, too. Although this demo has nothing to do with 911 at all, the word 'Debris' was burned into my head when watching a documentary about 911. I just loved the phonetics of it. And, coincidentally, also the other big American catastrophy left its mark. When the pictures of the flooded New Orleans appeared, there were houses and bridges melting with the water everywhere. As tragic as it was, the visual impression was incredible. There was one particular picture of a bridge, which looked as if it was just diving into the water and I knew I had to somehow capture that impression for Debris. Some more similarities to films I came up with are the scene with the pirate corporations in 'The meaning of life' and the first appearance of the marshmellow man in "Ghostbusters". K... that's all that comes to my mind at the moment. Let me know if you find some more :)"
For Suicide Barbie by TBL the music is based on a sample from a former no1 swedish chart topper by a female singer called Veronica Maggio, the song is called 'Dumpa Mig' and you can see it here on youtube. Some scenes in the Suicide Barbie demo could have been inspired from pictures from this website.
We included some pictures in this article. Anyway the point of this article is that everybody has his influences even the top demo makers of our demoscene. And I am glad they get their inspiration from somewhere. After all without FR and TBL it would be a little bit more quiet out there. My deepest repects to both groups! And well, honestly speaking I got my inspiration for this article from pouet.net so when looking in the mirror who am I anyway? :)
Magic of Nah-Kolor