Drawing and Imaging: Expansion into Space

When I imagined space, I thought of the Blade Runner series as well as similar movies with a dystopian, cyberpunk aesthetic.  I knew I wanted to build off of the advertisements that were shown in the movies and I wanted to try and recreate it.

I also read a few articles on the future of advertising, and found several topics I wanted to work on, which was the freemium subscription model, targeted advertising, and advertisements that use shock value to catch attention.

In combining the digital and analog aspects of the assignment, I decided on creating an interior subway scene, as I could use the different people on the subway to show a variety of advertisements.

These ads would be made in photoshop and illustrator, then put into blender, or made as solid objects in blender.

Example of advertisement made in photoshop and illustrator. The wave symbol was created in illustrator and made into a pattern. The advertisement is what I imagine a worst case scenario could be regarding euthanasia if it is taken advantage of.

I also found some 3d models for the holograms I wanted to create.

Regarding the subway, I modeled everything in the interiors and added textures to each of the materials. I didn’t realize, however, that my scene would be too much information for my computer to handle. I was able to render a small, blurry image, but even that took around 40 minutes and half of my battery to create.

Different layers of the subway.

For each part of the subway, I made different materials and textures.

This was a metal for the pipes, for example. I added fingerprints for the pipes that people would commonly hold onto and left others more shiny. The advertisements were given light to emit and a bit of transparency so they could be looked through.

For the analog aspect, I drew the figures that I wanted to represent with the advertisements, including an old man, a well dressed man, a pregnant woman, and a younger man.

I drew these to match the perspective that I had set for my scene, then placed them as planes inside the scene and resized them to match. The advertisements were then placed around them in perspective. In the final rendered image, the advertisements on the walls were not ones that I created.

This was the final rendered scene that I created, which took around 6 hours of rendering time. I would definitely try to work more reasonably in the future and maybe work on a lower scale.  However, I enjoyed this project and was happy to have a reason to work with blender.