Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1171: Duskmourn Art with Ovidio Cartagena

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Ovidio Cartagena, the art director for Duskmourn: House of Horror, to talk about the visual look of the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work at home edition So today I have a video Cartagena. We're gonna talk about our direction of Dusk Mourn. So hey, hey video Hey, okay, so Where do we start? So you're you're I think we start that the idea the two things we knew going into this week It got greenlit was it is a horror set inspired by like 80s sort of modern horror and There was a house the whole thing was inside a giant house. Those are the two things we signed on for Um, so talk about okay, you're the art director and you're given this assignment. Where do you start?

So talk about, okay, you're the art director and you're given this assignment, where do you start? Probably the earliest ideas was, I think I had just read a novel where there's a mansion that just keeps growing. And we spoke in a world building team about making this a plane wide mansion. And that snowballed into like, okay, you never get out of the mansion. This is just all one house, you never get out of the mansion.

This is just all one house. You never get out of the house. You're always going to be trapped here, even if you think you're outside. So that was like the very first thing. And that got us off on the sprint. I remember talking to Jose, hey, let's start playing around on how an outside looking environment might feel like it's inside. Maybe there's a forest but there's carpet on the floor or there's walls or there's doors, you know? And there were some very early concept art of that. So one of the first things,

the first two things we were testing for was how can we make this feel expensive and not claustrophobic? You know, just like small spaces. No, we wanted big spaces. Because this is magic, the gathering, you have to have different biomes, you have to have all manner colors and so on. And the other thing is glitchy static was weirdly one of the very first things I wanted to see to the point that one of the very first pieces of concept art was done by me with like a glitch ghost pretty much in the shape that it looks now, you know, like by better artists, of course, but we got that done.

Yeah. What does it explain to the audience, what does a glitch mean? When you say a glitch, what does that look like? Well, I'll give you the short version. Okay. A lot of horror movies rely on unreliable technology. A symbol for that, 40 years ago, was TV static when there's no channel on. You know, some of us saw it, some people just don't see that version of that anymore.

But several movies have used it to great effect. I did spend a lot more time on this explaining that to the artists because I didn't want any pixels, you know know I wanted waves you actually are catching static from the universe when you tune all the way to the to the limits of like the bandwidth yeah so uh that's the very first thing you know we've all seen movies where something comes out of the tv yeah so I wanted to capture that randomness. And it quickly became this is the spirit world, you know, crunched in between reality. Yeah.

So one of the things I know on the mechanic side that we were very conscious of was we were trying very hard, like magic has done horror before. Obviously, Innistrad has got the core new, Phyrexia is kind of what I call like alien horror. How much were you trying to make your own definition, your own look that didn't look like other things we had done? Oh, very early on, I think it was it was tough because normally artists default to gothic when you say the word horror yeah it was very tough not going there and we did a bunch of stuff in like any early creative process what you want to do is you get the you get the stereotypes out of your mind

first so you do a bunch of pieces with the most obvious solutions and okay cool then what we start giving it a twist you know and I think the set came together really nicely Doug Emily and I talked extensively about how to expand monsters because when you say horror first monsters that come in are the classic ones and we didn't want that yeah So we started, okay, so what about, I remember Emily was like, what about wicker people that are just like trapped in wicker? And I foolishly said, no, that doesn't look cool enough. But I followed Emily's instinct. I started putting together ideas I gave it to Amanda and Amanda just gave us some great concept art and the illustrators just give some

Amazing monsters on that. So that's just one side, you know beasties is probably one of the coolest creations In the set. It's still a monster. It's got some elements of friendliness, but it's a little disquieting And they have inspiration from all over we had like three iterations on them. I like how they came out So you little by little you keep adding things that that you've seen in some movie or original creations Or or like I mentioned To the media we were talking yesterday I mentioned to the media, we were talking yesterday, John was just born in the wrong decade. He should have been born to work in the 80s, not born in the 80s. And he designed so many monsters that feel practical, like practical effects types monsters. He would have been great back then. Yeah, real

quickly, just for people that might not know what we're talking about here. Nowadays, with computers, CGI, like most of the effects you see in the movies are done with CGI, meaning computers are doing them. But when you go back to the 80s, that wasn't really an option. So when you had a monster, you had to physically, whatever you were making, you had to physically make it. And so it has a different quality to it because you are you are limited to things you could physically make. The computer is kind of less limited. You can do a lot more things with

the computer, but it has a very distinctive look to it. And that's why we were talking about 80s horror. There's a very distinctive look to 80s horror because it's very, very practical in the way that it has its effects. Yes. So what one thing that happens is you're wrestling with anatomy, but also with the medium, what the medium can do. You're also designing a monster so that you can rig it and move it not in unlimited ways. So you can puppet it, you know, like, what is it gonna be remote control? It's gonna be so you need it. We needed someone who understood this from the inside out.

Yeah. And we got someone whose life is this type of thing. He was just born too late for that, you know, so you got to do it here. So one of the things that's really interesting is horror films love visual motifs. That's just a trope of horror films. Yeah. So, can we talk a little bit about some of the visual motifs that you wove into the set? So, the first one, as we talked, is the moths.

I absolutely love moths. They almost didn't make it into the set. I commissioned a lot of wallpapers. Just variations on the moth. Leon did like, I had like a whole section of the art wall and for those who don't know the art wall is a wall of concept art where we hang all the pieces that artists are making and you check what you approve, you take down what you don't approve, and so on. It's a pretty big wall. The whole studio loves swinging by,

and we have one now in the new studio. That's really cool. People love swinging by and talking to you about it. People love taking a look, and so on. You're smart. You put it right by the kitchen so people can swing by and not in the kitchen. So, in that occasion, I think we had... I wanted... I came up with putting moths everywhere,

and we didn't know if Valga Voth was going to be a moth. But I was targeting a moth. Explain who Valga Voth is for the audience, because they don't know. Valga Voth is a demon who actually made the mansion grow into a horror mansion. So he's the most powerful creature in all of Duskborn. He has permeated every aspect of it. That's why you see moths everywhere. And Balgavoth himself has kind of a mothman shape, you know. Of course, like driven out of control, you know, several arms and you can't really tell where the face is or maybe there's two faces, three faces, depending on the iteration of Balgaboth. Yeah, one of the real quickly, this is a story, but the one thing, one of my

favorite bits of story is that he got trapped in the house, he sort of cursed to be trapped in the house, so his solution to that was just make the house the size of the world. Yeah, he's still playing by the rules, you know, technically correct, the best kind of correct. So, Valdovoth really was, it was a great character, but he came about very organically, you know, we had some ideas about him. I remember holding a brainstorm with the concept artists

to say, how does Valdovoth look like? And Yokubas and John did a great job starting to flesh that out. We didn't require a lot of tweaks you know it just I just wanted some shape clarity and so on so that's a big motif there's even a cultist faction that worships him and they all dress kind of like moths. Hands with chandeliers. I think at the time I had just watched Labelle et la Bête, the movie by Jean Cocteau. And in that movie, you see actual people hands holding chandeliers coming out of the wall. And that's what Jean Cocteau could do back in the

day. I was like, I thought we do a variation on that? And so we put hands on lamps, on chandeliers, and a bunch of stuff. So it's one of the motifs of the black aligned wallpaper. And if you take a look at the whole set, because my goal was the house needs to feel like a character in itself. Each mana alignment in the house has its own wallpaper, its own motifs. So you know when you are in red aligned, you know when you're in white aligned. So moth is black aligned. Moth? No, hands is black. Moth shows up everywhere. Hands black aligned, hands blue aligned too. But the hands in black are

different, have a different shape shape in blue it's tiles not wallpaper. And in in the mist mors which is the white align each of them have their own the boiler bilges for red. They have boiler bilges has of course piping and has red moths with a striped pattern. White has a lot of drapes and they look like moth wings that blow around. Somehow, I don't know how he did it. They all look unique and it doesn't look repetitive. What does green do?

Green has overgrowth. So green has a lot of mold and fungi, and it starts taking the lichen starts taking the shape of moths. It also has plants that grow human parts instead of fruit. So one of the things that you did that I really enjoyed looking through the set is that you took a lot of like here's a here's a fear that people have let's build something out of this fear and so there's a lot of like a lot of one of where you just sort of okay this is a cool thing to play into like I like the the teeth one I how did you sort of work through those how did you make those kind of so you know what um people have asked a lot about that. That's probably, this is probably

a concept push where I've done the most concept art. So for people who may, who may not know, the art director normally doesn't do concept art or doesn't do much concept art, mostly because you want the artist to come up with a solution themselves and if you as an AD make something, the artist will think that's the right answer and that's not totally the right answer. Anyone can come up with a cool idea. But fears came about after the concept was when we had already closed our window with all the outside artists. Jules was like, okay, so we need something.

This is going to be like a unified faction. I was like, Jesus. So we came, we had a list of fears that people normally have. We initially keep them as nightmares, which was very useful to me because we needed something that was scary but symbolic and that's my specialty because I did my thesis on surrealism. Okay. So combining disparate symbols to form an unclear but ominous message is kind of my specialty. It's something I've done in my personal artwork. So here I got to do it for Magic the Gathering. I brought along Esther Wu, another concept artist who helped design this whole faction. And the only common element is the dreaming faces that are like, and it was from an early sketch by Esther and I just blew it up. The teeth

one, I was doing it during a meeting i remember and as i've said before i'm glad i have a job where they let me draw during meetings and nobody bothers me so i was and i started passing it along to forrest was another ad and he's like oh you have to do this this so we started going back and forth with the design was finished just refining it applied it to the rest of the faction and there we go fierce you know what's cool is we created basically a sandbox for artists and writers to play with and create chimeric fears you can basically right now if you came up with a new fear we could basically design one yeah it's really cool so one of the things that i know um i'm working on the document that ann Annie handed off right now, and she talks a lot about mood and tone.

So I want to talk a little bit about, like, one of the things that's very unique about 80s horror versus other types of horror is that you often didn't see the monster until pretty far into the film. That a lot of 80s is sort of like just the like it felt creepy and scary even though you didn't actually see anything for a while. Can we talk a little bit about how from an art standpoint how did you get in the mood and tone that sort of the a lot of the 80s vibe is a feel how did you do that? So we we didn't just pull from the 80s we pulled in from the 70s as well I've mentioned before that we pulled in from giallo cinema I watched a few of those there's there's a use and it bled into the United States a use of colored light that makes things uncanny and disquieting H.P. Lovecraft was one of the first writers to mention that in horror like like a sickly green. And who knows what that green meant in his head. But we were trying to

replicate some of that. And book covers as well had that feel. So you light a face, a screaming face a certain way, you know what genre you're looking at. And I wanted that in the set. We also had rooms. Rooms helped build a lot of the mood and the somber and the themes and motifs of the set. There's this room that's a funeral parlor and a morgue and the funeral on one side you see the caskets. In the middle you see one of the caskets opening up with a lot of flowers. And on the right side panel you see the morgue, but one of the corpses is sitting and pointing at the viewer. But the corpse is not seen. Only the hand is seen. You don't see the face, You don't see the body. You don't see anything. That's pretty moody Yeah, you know that came from a story I read because I've read tons of horror. So That's that's pretty heavy pretty cool stuff

Multiply that by what 30 rooms that we did it gets pretty cool. Lots of creativity in the set Yeah, the one thing that I really enjoy about it is that, and this is, horror does this really well, where you're not sort of confined by reality on some level. Like there's a piece where you see the guy's brain, but it's teeth on his head. You know what I'm talking about? And it just, I mean, horror does this really well

and the set captures this, is like you're not, is like, you're not making realistic things, you're making kind of symbolic things, like Hoare does symbology really well. Yeah, that was important to me. And as I said before, like, my knowledge of how to do surrealism helps a ton with the set, especially the guy with the brain and the teeth. Yeah. I was very specific about no

No, no, the head's not ripped open It has to be clean and neat and it has to look like a mouth And if you see the brain inside people are gonna have be like what so that happened multiplied 300 cards, right? Everything we were thinking about how to specifically combine things One thing I said yesterday, I thought it was, it's so made it the way I approach the set. The playground for us as horror creators in this case of the set is not the medium. It's not the medium, it's the mind. So when you combine things in a way that the viewer complements what you created with their

imagination, now you've created horror. That's cool. Oh, so something you said that I'm curious to get it on tape here. Let's talk about some of the things that the set wasn't. So you had a bunch of rules of things you wouldn't show. Like what couldn't the set have? What was off limits visually? Lots of blood.

I don't think it enhances the gameplay at all. I think it might do something for some movies, but for us, I think the symbols were enough. No blood, no gore. I didn't want too much of that. There's some scenes that are scary though. There's some stuff without showing anything out of line. It was pretty scary. We're talking about the the Jolly Balloon Man. Oh yeah. That's pretty scary. Yeah, can you spot any gore or blood?

No, it's just a cool idea. You get creative. It's scarier than if you included blood or gore. We didn't want to put children in danger or implied danger. We wanted the set to feel like survivors to have a means of agency and, hey, they could get out of this one. Maybe not. And very much possibly not.

But they could, you know. One thing I said from the beginning and it was hard. I had to enforce it up until the very last card commission. No gothic motiffing. No ribbing. No pointed arches, no stained glass. I had a very specific rule set of how the mansion has to look inside. I gave very specific architectural references of how the mansion had to look.

And it's hard because if you're a 3D artist, for example, you already purchased a bunch of like a whole library of gothic motifs and you think this is where you're gonna get to use it. I'm sorry, mate. No, you gotta use something else. So that that was really hard. There's a lot of wood as opposed to stone. If you noticed, yeah, the finishes are late 19th century manner designed either in the in the Ottoman style or in the it's called nouveau in English but it has another name naturalist style so there were there were several rules that I didn't want drapey ghosts. I didn't want any drapes on them. They were indeed just glitchy. And each of the glitches had like, if either it's red align, it's a combination of bodies. If it's blue, it's angry and it's mad and it has glowing eyes and if it's white it's helpful. So there's several rules that we set, several ground rules.

The other thing is if you design a monster it should not look like an animal. It should look obviously designed, like a human mind came up with it. And that's one of the trappings of practical effects. Yeah. You see the artist's hand and the artist's creativity when you see the monster. It's not designed like sleek, like evolution shaped. No, it's hodgepodge combined.

So something else you had told me was we're staying away from cathedrals? Yes, yes. No Gothic cathedrals, nothing that you would see inside a church. For the reasons that we have Avacyn, the Church of Avacyn, you have Dominaria de Benalis. We've exploited that a lot. We wanted to give them that space, and we wanted to create our own space. Yeah, one of the things that's really interesting is from a visual standpoint as well as a mechanical standpoint that every world we make we want to make sure that it has its own identifiers. So that, like if we show you a picture in a vacuum, hopefully you know what world it's from.

That our worlds have a strong visual identity. Yeah. If you see a hydron, you know you're in Zendikar. If you see the sign of Avacyn, you know in Innistrad. If you see a moth, you can guess where we are. Okay, so we talked about the moth motif. Were there any other motifs that we didn't get to? Any other motifs that you tried to stream through the set? Oh, one motif that was really hard to do is because in black-aligned areas, one motif was the mold has taken so much life that it becomes like a group of hands.

And you only see that in a few cards. And I'll tell you why. Hands are hard to draw. So we were very selective about where we're gonna make an artist draw 30, 50, 40 hands. But it was a very cool motif that I liked because it looks, initially we were worried that it was gonna read like a creature, but it doesn't.

It just really feels organic, like a part of the house. The furniture all has teeth. Doorways have teeth on them. When in doubt, add teeth. There's a lot of teeth. That's the trick. Okay, so let's talk a little bit, um, there's a lot of creepy things, but one of the things that I liked about the set is you put a few things that weren't creepy in. So let's talk

about the glimmers a little bit. Like you put some stuff in that was actually hopeful rather than everything being scary. Yeah, you know, glimmers came about, I think it was Doug saying, hey, there's a lot of dark stuff. We want something that's a little hopeful. How about a glimmer? Doug's great at naming things. A lot of names he comes up with, they go right to the end of the product. And a lot of, we change a lot of names. Many of the stuff that Doug comes up with, it just sticks around. So the glimmers were our way of having the survivors, which is another faction in the house. The only one we should root for, I suppose suppose but I think a lot of people are gonna root for the monsters the glimmers are a manifestation of hope and anything that

you love so in my case I love books my glimmer would look like a book and it would lead me to safety or to friends everyone Everyone glimmers are personalized, just like fears. And that's why they take on several shapes. We got to get a little cutesy, you know, with them, which is cool because in the middle of all of this, it's very clear that this is something you should follow. The gold color too gives them away. They and they splash when they walk around the mansion,

they splash as if it's water. They create ripples wherever they stepped. So you can follow them around and you see their trail. Yeah, those are, like you talked earlier about how there's no animals. And I think the glimmers of exception is like there's a lamb. One of them has a lamb, you know. Yeah, a lamb.

Yeah, you get, like the, yeah, you get like the interesting thing to me is there's really this motif of like body parts. So like you get things that serve a reminiscent of humanity, but clearly are not. Yeah. And then I, I think it's really interesting in that a lot of this set is more about the imagination and things that aren't real. You know, like a lot of, for example, if you go to Innistrad, for example, the horror there are like real, I mean, they're fantasy, but they're real things. You know, I can see a werewolf or a vampire that are more tangible. And here, right, the nature of which I really enjoy is that they're like, you get the essence of things, but they're not

real things. They're sort of like, they hint at things. Yeah, it's a heavily symbolic set and it's the way we create our own nightmares. You know, in dreams, everything is in flux and everything is subject to morphing into something else. subject to morphing into something else or something is scary but you don't know exactly why at first glance yeah I was trying to I was trying to hit on that one of the writers that did that very well was legati so I was trying to bring that into Magic the Gathering some some of that symbolism. Mark Samuel is another writer and Caitlin Kiernan. So some people that just really mastered how how the dream affects us and I wanted to replicate that here. So one final question we're almost wrapping up here. Something that I know you've talked about I'm curious to talk to the people who listen. When you make a set, how much is the artist you choose dictate what the feel of the set is?

It depends on the artist. It depends on the face. When... It also depends on the set for me. In the case of Duskmore, I think I was very influential on the field. But as I mentioned before, someone like John Tedrick had incredible influence on the set just because of his talent for creating monsters. And he influenced definitely how we did monsters in the set. It just depends on the, sometimes I just have a very specific vision

and the artists get frustrated if they don't get it because they have to try a lot of times. Sometimes I have to draw them myself like the fears, you know, with Esther helped me a lot. But I did on the back end, I did like maybe four or five more fears of fear failed tests and so on that came from my own creativity so it just depends on what the set wants to do this particular set Dusk Mourn is probably one of the most complicated I've done because of the because we were threading a needle and the hole was really tiny you know we wanted it's 80s it's horror but it's not in the strad and it's uh but it's not exactly a copy of the 80s but it's what you remembered but we reference what you like sorry so we we really were

kind of on a blades edge with the set and that required very specific direction so I I'm not normally the type of person who asks for stuff and I'll know it when I see it and I know what I stuff and I'll know it when I see it. And I know what I want and I can see it. So I'll just tell you what I see. That was the case here. More than with other sets, I think I had a very specific vision of how the whole plane should look. And that helped a lot. And I was open to suggestions, but I'm very happy with how things came up in the end and all the symbols, how they come together. You get to see a glimmer, a razor kin,

which is kind of like a mechanical serial killer. You get to see a Mothman and some other cryptids in the same magic set, which is kind of weird. You get to see a bathtub instead of an island, you know, and an upside down lake. So all that stuff came together pretty nicely. I'm proud of how the set looks. Well, I just want to say, I think the set looks amazing and it's really cool like I this is definitely one of those sets as you look through you have to sort of spend time looking at the art because there's just so many details and so much full stop so I just want to

thank you for being here and for all your work on the set I think you guys did just an amazing job. Thanks mate. So everybody else guys I am at my desk so we all know what that means means it's the end of my drive to work. So, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.