How the South of Midnight art team achieved its artisan animation style inspired by stop-motion

Think of first-party Xbox games and you'd be forgiven for assuming they all lean on the cutting edge of photorealism. After all, last year's Senua's Saga: Hellblade II was a tour de force showcase for Unreal Engine 5 while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is arguably the most cinematic game based on a beloved movie icon.

Compulsion Games however still has its indie roots that can be felt in South of Midnight, its first game since becoming a member of Xbox Game Studios. "We've just had nothing but support from Microsoft the whole time so it's been amazing," art director Whitney Clayton tells me.

Whereas the studio's previous game, We Happy Few, had been a partly procedurally-generated game, South of Midnight is a tightly designed hand-crafted single-player action adventure, which is also something of a rarity in today's AAA landscape of vast open worlds, live-service models, or both.

"That was the dream," Whitney says, adding: "We wanted a compact and crafted narrative adventure, where we can push the polish, because if you did something massive and expansive then you probably wouldn't be able to obsess over the details that we wanted to be able to obsess over."

Emulating imperfections

There is, of course, another layer to the meaning of South of Midnight's hand-crafted design. Just from looking at it, it stands out with a gorgeous visual style that takes inspiration from the best stop-motion animation as well as a tactile textural quality. It's also a thematic fit for teenage protagonist Hazel, who discovers her power as a weaver of magic, applied in a literal sense since her weapons are actually weaving tools, including a spindle and distaff.

To emulate that stop-motion animation style, the team had actually visited a local stop-motion studio to study their maquettes. "We had to recreate and reverse-engineer the feeling of those hand-crafted models in 3D," says Whitney.

Compared to the slick high-fidelity polish game visuals tend to pursue, making the stop-motion effect convincing and charming comes down to emulating its imperfections and constraints. Animation director Mike Jungbluth adds, "If you look at the way a stop-motion film is made, the faces are sort of pushed around by the thumb, and you see little markings of thumb prints, or a brush or tool that's moved it around, so we have a shader that will do that on the main character's face in cut scenes."

There is of course the challenge of wanting to have a game with stop-motion animation in an action-adventure game that has platforming and combat sections where you don't want that aesthetic mistaken for lag. "Our studio general manager Delilah Robinson worked with our associate animation director Vincent Schneider to create a set of rules that we can apply at runtime in-engine as a sort of post-process at the end of everything being rendered," Mike explains.

"Essentially, we can set markers on different points of the body and do a check on the last frame and the current frame. We know for combat, if you're dropping any frames in an unintentional way then you're going to have problems with gameplay. We can really adjust it so that there's a lot of going back and forth to make sure that as you play it, you're never losing any of the important timing and beats, while still maintaining this little hint of the stop-motion treatment."

Speaking for the South

Ultimately, the stop-motion aesthetic is also to complement the game's thematic pillars, which in South of Midnight's case is a combination of Southern Gothic with dark fantasy. While there is a rich tradition of the genre in literature and film, it's perhaps less common in games, or when there is, it leans heavily into horror. Citing more surreal examples like Beasts of the Southern Wild and O Brother, Where Art Thou, Whitney says she was more interested in being able to play with contrasts.

"Southern Gothic can be pretty bleak and claustrophobic, and we wanted this game to have this whimsical fantasy exploration feeling to it," Whitney explains. "Once we started digging into [the genre] and learning about the creatures and folktales, that's when the idea of magic and creatures of Southern folklore came about."

Guillermo del Toro's work, namely Pan's Labyrinth, was another source of inspiration, especially the way that film moves between reality and fantasy. South of Midnight begins in a very grounded place as Hazel and her mother are preparing for a hurricane before she finds herself not only weaving magical powers but interacting with folk tales come to life.

Perhaps as the genre isn't as commonly known outside of the US, with less ingrained expectations like you might find in say Greek mythology, it also gave Compulsion the license to make its own interpretations, such as making a giant talking catfish your guide and narrator.

"We extrapolate a lot for the Southern folktale side of things," says Whitney. "There are a lot of oral folk tales that talk about creatures and myths, there's different ways to interpret that, and some stuff we just made up ourselves and it felt right. It felt Southern, it felt like a Southern folktale."

Where it was important not to overstep were elements that were culturally sensitive, especially in its representation of Black characters. In representing the culture of the Deep South, South of Midnight also doesn't overlook its portrayal of the hardships the region has experienced in its history, including slavery and poverty. Being a studio based in Montreal, it was all the more important to collaborate with authentic voices, which doesn't just mean working with consultants but having diverse representation among the team.

"We wanted people on the team that could speak for the Deep South and speak for being Black American, it's just better to have diversity in games and in your team, you just make more interesting things and it's a more fulfilling collaboration," says Whitney, explaining that collaboration is actually very seamless across departments.

She adds: "It's at that stage when you're designing a character in the beginning that you get all the different disciplines coming in to make sure that that character is the best it can be. I think that's an important part of production, making sure you have that space in the beginning concept phase so it doesn't feel like one discipline is in silo designing it and everyone else has to live with it."

South of Midnight releases on Xbox Series X/S and PC on 8 April, 2025. Our South of Midnight review goes live 5pm GMT / 9am PST on 3 April.