King and Queen Des100
This project involved designing a chess piece to be 3d printed. The chess piece had to take inspiration from a movie and the process had to include a moodboard, sketches, 3d mockup, and a final figure.
The movie that I chose as inspiration was Akira Kurosawa's Dreams. Dreams was Kurosawa's final movie, and consisted of eight short films inspired by recurring dreams he had had through his life. One of these was called the Tunnel. The Tunnel centers around a former Japanese WW2 commander whose whole platoon had died under his command. It follows him on a walk home, where he stops at a tunnel to an abandoned mine. One by one, his former soldiers walk out of the tunnel. Their faces are blue and their eyes are blackened. They also maintain that their families are waiting to see them and their obedience to the commander, despite him causing their death.
The main things that I wanted to show in my design was the often irrational worship of leaders and important figures. I felt that combining elements of religious and dystopian artworks could work to show that. These two ideas relate to Kurosawa's Dreams in that his movie comments on the unceasing belief that the Japanese had in their leaders during World War Two that had been driven by widespread propaganda. These acts of worship helped to create a somewhat dystopian reality where individuals would sacrifice their life for their nation and its leaders.
After deciding on the relative direction I wanted my design to go in, I began drafting ideas. Most of my early ideas followed two main forms. First, was having one figure larger and the center of the piece. This figure was either on top of something or surrounded by smaller people/objects. I felt this showed my main ideas in a pretty simple, easy to understand way. I later began changing how the main figure was standing, which came to resemble the Christ the Redeemer statue, with its arms outstretched. The second idea I played around with was a large face or mask. Generally, I isolated the face, where it was much larger than would be expected for a chess piece. This took inspiration from both the faces of the soldiers in Dreams, but also the general dystopian symbol of a 'big brother' like figure.
Following the ideation stage, I chose a few designs that I tried to refine and improve.
I then chose my final design. I liked this one because it involved a few of the symbols I was hoping to include, like the christ-like figure and a pedestal.
I then made an initial mock-up on rhino. I ended up deleting this one after I realised the size and shape of it was wrong.
This is the final version. It ended up slightly different than the final sketch, but I think that was mainly because my ability on Rhino is pretty limited. The design revolves around the figure at the top, which is similar to the Christ the Redeemer statue, as well as a typical king chess piece. The figure is on top of a tall, warped hill type thing, which is dotted with people who are seemingly sucked in by it as they try to reach the top. The way that each component works to show the ideas I wanted to display is my favourite feature of this design. However, I think it looks quite clunky. The figures are all quite cartoonish and the hill is weirdly shaped (more like a plastic bag).
On reflection, I am relatively happy with the process to finish this design, despite not being that happy with the final design. Obviously, this is mainly because I haven't used Rhino before and probably didn't spend enough time working on it either. In the future, I would like to spend more time getting comfortable with the software, rather than doing the minimum to make something that loosely resembled my initial sketch.
