Offenbach scores Federico Solmi's Unity studio footage
A process reel shows hand-painted surfaces wrapped onto 3D models — the game engine used as camera and stage, never as game.
In June, Federico Solmi posted a process reel recorded inside the Unity game engine and scored, of all things, to the Barcarolle from Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann. It is a rare backstage look at how the "video paintings" get made — and a reminder that one of the most committed game-engine artists working is, at heart, a painter.
Federico Solmi’s process reel, recorded inside Unity and scored to the Barcarolle. Via Instagram.
Solmi's pipeline runs in exactly the opposite direction from most game art. Surfaces are hand-drawn and painted first, then scanned, mapped onto three-dimensional digital models, and animated with game engines, motion capture, and digital scripting. The result is a world where every texture carries brushwork — garish, seasick, and pointedly satirical about power and its pageantry. The most recent showcase was Adrift at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, which ran January 30 through April 19 of this year and paired new video paintings with The Ship of Fools, a monumental canvas reworking Géricault's Raft of the Medusa; the Brooklyn Rail's review is a good primer on the project.
What the reel makes plain is the role Unity actually plays in the studio: not a game to be won but a camera and a stage — a place to light, block, and shoot paintings that have learned to move. Game engines keep getting repurposed by every discipline that touches them; it is the same current that carries Indira Ardolic's live-coded engine performances, where the software becomes an instrument instead. In Solmi's hands the engine is an easel, and Offenbach supplies the soundtrack.
Painters, filmmakers, choreographers — Killscreen follows everyone who walks into a game engine. The free newsletter is where those dispatches land.
