Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Notes from the Field: Looking back to our Future


A friend of mine once said, "Anything worth doing, is worth doing right." What I took from that for my work is to do the pre-production before the production. Because any journey you go you need to be prepared in every way.

The reality in all this though is you can overthink things to such a degree as to immobilize the actual doing of the work. So for my approach I laid down the big notes, the items that I needed to clearly address. First and foremost was the look of the world in which this story is staged.


Secondly I had to have the characters personalities reflect the world they live in. Scott didn't write the visuals anymore than to explain things to move the story along. That being said all we knew for years was that it was "in the future".

The characters were pretty fleshed out, and have evolved somewhat over time as our tastes and skills have evolved. But when it came down to this iteration of work consistency and imagination were very important. Going against current convention of "sci-fi" entertainment I took a look to our past to find a look for our future. The Machine Age was a perfect place to start. It's strong shapes and open spaces really make for the kind of atmosphere I wanted to play in. It would give it a distinct look on the shelves to boot as many people are caught up in the world of tomorrow.




While these are older concepts some of the base ideas have held true and have been carried through in the books. I hope you'll come to appreciate the effort being made to transfer you into our future.

=s=

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