↪︎The hibernation tech described in the book is more akin to a resurrection from the dead than the standard “freeze” found in other sci-fi novels. The characters refer to the sleeping pods as "coffins", and the hibernation itself is called "being undead." when creating the capsule design, we tried to build off this funereal aesthetic. Starting with the references.
↪︎We thought we’d start and end the film with siri lying in the pod/ coffin. We spent quite some time working out the details to make sure the close-ups looked good. We noticed that cryopods in movies/games all tend to have more or less the same design. But you had this really interesting concept of “undead” bodies, instead of just frozen ones.
We decided to design our pods based on that idea — that's where the body being fully covered with a piece of cloth comes from. And the overall contrast of the clean mechanical design of the outer shell with the almost organic inside parts is supposed to support the concept of "dead on the outside/ alive on the inside".
↪︎Actually, someone sent me those coffin shots a couple of hours before you did. They're gorgeous. Not exactly how I'd envisioned them, but truthfully, your vision is better anyway.
↪︎Theseus carried two identical shuttles, scylla and charybdis, which the main characters used for sorties on rorschach. The book didn’t really describe the design of these ships, but from individual passages we knew that they could barely fit 4 people in spacesuits. Near the end of the novel, one of the shuttles was converted to accommodate one cryo-pod and the equipment necessary for a multi-year flight. Using this data, we were able to estimate the approximate dimensions of the ships and design them based off that.
↪︎Within our team, we ended up calling this asset “frankenshuttle”. The ship model ended up changing hands several times before reaching its final look—too much work was required for just one modeler. One of us would start working on the asset, and then be forced to hand off the work do to other, commercial projects piling up. So the frankenshuttle kept getting passed around between team members.
↪︎We’ve just had to push the delivery date to 2018. Sad smile. The truth is our ambitions for this short are growing faster than we can produce the results. The time from october to december is always super busy with commercial work so the other guys had to almost stop their activity on the project. And i’ve been stuck on the cryo-pod’s shuttle interior for almost 4 weeks now, but it still looks too generic to me.
↪︎Piffle. It looks terrific. I mean, i see what you mean— it could be an outtake from any number of spaceship interiors from alien to the expanse — but dude, the function of the equipment limits the amount of novelty you can inject into design. Sure, you want a distinctive style — but you put too many weird-ass features in a chair and no one will be able to sit in the damn thing.
Of course, you're the expert. But i think it looks beautiful.
↪︎The drones operated by major bates were featured in many of the novel’s key scenes, so we paid special attention to their design.
These insect-like machines had to carry heavy protection in order to be able to operate within rorschach’s harsh electromagnetic environment. At the same time, the design needed to preserve their main function — that of combat equipment, semi-autonomous weapons.
↪︎We ended up landing on a design borrowed from certain species of beetles — a durable shell that covers the important parts, and can temporarily open up when some action needs to be performed.
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Number of people involved:8
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Hours Spent:824
