This is a story based in an era where space travel is a commonplace, but still fanciful activity. The idea of a hopeful future, in the present, as seen through the style of the past. We follow a character on his trip from an earth-like planet to various interplanetary colonies that are each somewhat different.
Pre-Production
Here I wanted to go through some of my process and how I came up with my final looks. I began with creating some rough sketches to explore "the universe" of the story.
From establishing the basic premise of the story, I moved to some more detailed sketches of the specific scenes I had in mind to work on layout and content. I decided to use illustrated perspective to tell my story.
For the sake of brevity, I'll only show the process for a couple of frames from the first chapter. The story begins with the idea of a spaceport on an earth-like planet, which is basically an airport but for rockets. In the first frame we see our main character looking out over the tarmac with the hope and expectancy, yet gravity (no pun intended) of his upcoming journey with the activity of a busy spaceport going on behind him. The second frame is an overview of the active spaceport from the outside.
Production
Once I was happy with my general layout and content here, I began the work of creating the forms and colors in vector so I could paint and texture them with more detail later.
Texturing and painting is such an awesome and rewarding step; also, I think the most fun. Look how a pretty basic design almost completely transforms into really communicating the mood I was going for.
The basic steps of what I took here are as follow. I pretty much coppied each individual vector element into Photoshop and organized the layers to rebuild the scene. From there, each major element recived it's own unique texture and painting treatment. From there I placed texures over the whole image along with lighting effects and my color grade.
In addition to the story frames, I also created some "universe collateral" for myslef to help me think through elements of the story in more detail. This is a consumer grade propaganda type piece for the rockets seen in these frames.
Conclusion
A lot of the process used here was discovered through pure trial and error. Lots of experimentation and Cmd+Z keystrokes. It was a fun journey to bring out some modern futuristic elements in the style of the 1950s 1960s (plus my own interpretation) and in the end very rewarding.
Btw, for those who would find this interesting, I got the title for this project from a song called Electric Heart by Philter.
