During a complete website redesign for Gaikai in 2014, we were tasked with creating a section that would highlight and contain information about the products that Gaikai has been involved with as part of Sony's new game streaming service, PlayStation™Now.  The design brief called for the creation of imagery that was not only high-quality, but also visually communicated the benefits of PlayStation™Now.

During this project, I was responsible for taking my the 3D rendered environments created by our Art Director and compositing in any live-action photography we had taken as well as creating any other elements we needed for the images. All of the compositing was achieved entirely in Photoshop.

PlayStation™Now allows users to access a huge library of PS3 games and stream them to their PS4, PS Vita, PS TV, and BRAVIA Smart TV. We needed a way to visually represent the concept of being able to stream games no matter where you are and no matter what device you're using. After some discussion, we settled on the idea of flowing transmission lines bringing the games to the user. The first image (above), shows a lone gamer sitting on his living room couch

playing his PS4. The flowing transmission lines move through the room and connect connect with his game controller, which enables him to play the game on his PS4. To expand on the concept of 'game streaming', we created the second image (below), in which we see a much wider shot than before that reveals other gamers in other rooms also streaming games on their devices (in this case they are both holding PS Vitas).

In addition to PlayStation™Now, Gaikai has worked with Sony to develop other features and technologies for PlayStation. One of those technologies is Share Play for the PS4, which allows users to invite their friends to play a PS4 game even if their friend doesn't own a copy of the game. Think of it like a virtual couch that allows you to play together with friends who live somewhere else entirely. Pretty exciting stuff! I came up with the concept for this image (above) pretty quickly.   

We would show two friends who were obviously in different locales (in this case one in a rural area and the other in a more urban setting) and show them playing the same game. We 3D modeled one room and used two sets of textures to differentiate them and then split them right down the middle. The TV with the game on it crosses the barrier between the rooms while those familiar flowing transmission lines connect everything. 

A fair amount of compositing went into these three designs. I always enjoy when designers take the time to show us exactly how they created an image, whether it be a logo, a digital painting, or just a really nice looking promotional piece.  

I wanted to return the same courtesy, and so I created the GIFs below that show somewhat of a step-by-step process (lots of steps were condensed for the sake of your time) for designing the three images in this series.

The images above show the final versions of these Product images as they exist today on the Gaikai website. Compositing images together is probably my most favorite thing to do as a designer, so I had a great time working on these and they came out great. The quality of our designs and the concepts we developed for

them served to be very influential in setting a visual tone for PlayStation™Now's marketing. In fact, the SCEA Marketing team was so impressed by these that they used them as inspiration to produce a video for E3 2014, during which Sony announced the PlayStation™Now service. You can watch the spot below.