Debris - Review by Adok/Hugi
"fr-041: debris." is the demo that won the Breakpoint 2007 demo competition and after that rapidly climbed the ladder into pouet's all-time top ten. The content of the demo could be summarized as destruction of a highly realistically rendered city. First we get to see rectangular particles flowing through the city. Later houses and streets are moving, and in the end even the sky becomes torn to pieces.
The whole demo was made with Farbrausch's own Werkkzeug3 demo-tool and consists of just a single .exe file sized slightly less than 180 kbytes. The visuals and direction were made by Fiver2 of Farbrausch (aka "theunitedstatesofamerica" - the handle he used when he was a member of Elitegroup), and the music comes from Ronny. According to people who were at Breakpoint, the audience at the party was enthuasiastic about the demo in the same way as "fr-08: .the .product" was appreciated years ago: hands clapping, standing ovations. It seems that a new classic has been born. And yet the style is something which appeals to some people more, to others less. It's pretty realistic, with the same set of dark-brown shades as in .the .product. For the few texts that appear in the demo - credits and greetings -, the Arial font is used. No drawn logos appear. All of this makes the demo look "serious" and this is in contrast e.g. to productions by Equinox which look playful and fun. (By the way, Equinox appears in the greetings part, and unlike the other groups that are greeted its name is written in a font with rotated letters; maybe this is a sign that Farbrausch too consider Equinox a group with an unusual style.)
Many people say they're impressed by the "direction" of the demo, in other words by the camera movements. This is definitely something that has been paid attention to. Nothing in the demo seems random, everything appears to be carefully planned, and the watchers get to see only what the director wanted them to see. Technically, the demo seems to be perfect. Still this won't become one of my personal favourites as I prefer more colourful demos.
Adok/Hugi