Introduction to Create Play: Idea Generations/ Mood Boards/ Research for City Entity Brief (Week 9)

Nov 24, 2016 For the first week of my team (Geanin, TZ and myself) working on our 'City as an Entity' brief, we have collated together all of our ideas that we have thought about in the previous week. Here are my sketchbook mind maps:

And here are TZ's

The overall concept my team decided on was a fusion of TZ's installation ideas with my concept of a dystopian city that portrays itself on the surface as a: "well-developed and functioning society, with strong leaders and honest media" but in reality it is a far more sinister and corrupt affair. Much like an authoritarian dictatorship regime. These are the dark tones that I'm going to research today.

The research areas for my concept: Vapourwave: Description: Vaporwave (British English: Vapourwave) is an electronic music subgenre that originated in the early 2010s and spread over the next half of the decade among various Internetcommunities. It is characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist fascination with retro cultural design, entertainment technology, consumer culture and advertising of the 1980s and 1990s, and styles of both corporate and popular music such as lounge music, smooth jazz and elevator music. Artists often embrace classical sculpture, 1990s web design, low poly computer renderings, glitch art, VHS recordings, cassette tapes, Japanese art and cyberpunk [Vaporwave, 2016] Vapourwave mood board:

Possible musical influences for Vapourwave: Yung Lean:

Vapourwave music:

It was from this idea of Vapourwave that I stumbled across this retro grainy/static/glitch effect that was present in many of the music videos. I have therefore created a mood board featuring these aesthetics Glitch Art mood board:

Foreign Culture: To create an idea that our city is in a distant land I decided to take a look into foreign cultures, mainly in the form of far eastern advertising. Foreign Culture mood board:

It appears that many scenes from Blade Runner can provide a good example of the tone we are trying to set:

This mood board then lead me to discovering this compilation of old Japanese adverts:

I then came across these adverts of western celebrities in Japanese commercials:

This compilation of western celebrities in Japanese adverts reminded me of scene in Bojack Horseman, where he travels to Pacific City: an underwater world, which has strange customs and speaks an inaudible alien language, with it's own alphabet. In this scene, which I have screen grabbed, the creators of the show parody the appearances of western celebrities in Japanese commercials, by using one of the shows own celebrities in a strange, non-nonsensical advert about baby food.

Propaganda: Whilst searching through pinterest I also came across old WWII propaganda posters, I like the idea of adding a sinister element to the city that my team are going to create. In my idiation brainstorm I considered a dystopian city state, and came up with this moodboard. Propaganda mood board:

I think a fusion with this art style and the Vapourwave and glitch-art aesthetics will create a really cool theme for our entity city. Foreign Alphabet research: Finally I have created a mood board of various foreign alphabets. I want to try my best to make the language that this city uses to be completely alien (much like the underwater language used in Pacific City- see Bojack Horseman reference form before). I shall use these examples of Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Cyrillic and Greek to inspire my own alphabet, that will be used in the various signs, advert and posters around the city.

Starting the Prototyping, Design and Overall project. Our roles were then split up and allocated after creating mood boards. Geanina is going to look into any possible sounds or music for our installation, I started her off by suggesting some of the Vapourwave music:

Myself and TZ also made a colour pallet based off the Vapourwave mood board:

We've decided that we really like the look of these pinks, purples, oranges and blues that are reoccurring. throughout the imagery. I'm going to look into more ideas for possible character design imagery, film and animation that can appear in our installation. Meanwhile, TZ is going to sketch out ideas for the physical, 3D aspects of the installation and research possible architecture for what our city backgrounds will look like. Together all three of us have outlined a main design, which will look something like this:

We also assigned ourselves some tasks that we need to get done for the next week, the following are mine:

All in all my notes for next week are the following:

To do: Book green screen Sketch concepts for propaganda posters (Have them glitch like holograms) Look at tutorials for glitch art on pinterest Language research Think of emblem for the city (character of the language I make up)