The History of the Future

Here are some images form a book the Jared so kindly lent us, called

"The History of the Future, Images of the 21st Century" by Christophe Canto and Odile Faliu.

The book serves as a time machine, where the authors comb the past to find images of the fabulous future people believed would happen from the 1850's to the 1950's. Of course, we are interested in the later part of this timeline, the 40s and 50s mainly, possibly the 30s as well.

Some of these images are of prototype cars from 1965, spaceships and cars designed by people from the 30's, with trains that look similar to the ones designed by Raymond Lowey. Other images show Utopian societies of the future as imagined by people from the 40's and 50's of what life would be like in the far-off year of 1980.

What all images share are a fun, perfect view of the future, where man is shooting towards the stars, with designs and architecture that reflects that belief. Curves, simple geometric shapes, colours and chrome all serve to envision this future. These are all the founding principles of Googie design.

New Research

Here some images I have obtained for Research. I got most from the internet by typing in counter's into google and some are from Ikea's website. Denny's restarant chain and Ed's Diner also proved useful as they have a fifties' motiff.

Pizza Planet

Here are some images of Pizza Planet I got from an Art of Toy Story book. I thought these restaurants were really googie and would serve as good research.

Lou Romano

I need some help on how to tone done colours and how to use light but luckily I found some pastels that Lou Romano did (he was the production designer on The Incredibles by the way) when he was working on the powerpuff girls. Here he really plays with the light and shows how you can tone down colours.

All images obtained from louromano.blogspot.com

Early Research

With this project, I didn't really want to go too realistic. Playing to the particular preferences and to the skills of Tony, I felt the project should go for a cartoony, stylised background. I didn't want the fight to be gritty and dark, like Fight Club or something, I wanted it to be exciting but fun too. I had in my mind something like the backgrounds to the Incredibles or the Jetsons and I discovered retro-futurism.

According to Wikipedia, Retro-futurism is a return to and an enthusiasm for the depictions of the future produced in the past both in science fiction and in non-futurism. The key architecture of retro-futurism is Googie architecture. Also known as doo-wop, it is influenced by car culture and the Space Age. Originating in California in the late 1940's, it continued into the mid 1960's. It epitomizes the spirit of a generation, looking onwards and upwards to a bright, technological future.

The elements of Googie are up swept roofs, large domes, exposed steel beams and lots of Kidney Bean shapes. All the examples below are either obtained from wikipedia's Googie architecture page or http://www.spaceageity.com/googie

I saw these buildings and thought that they where so much fun. The colours, the shapes, if the background looked like this not only would it be great to draw and model, but it would always keep the tone lighthearted.

From further reading I discovered that Googie architecture is exemplified in The Jetsons and in Tomorrowland in Disneyland.

It is also heavily used in the backgrounds of the Incredibles, which makes it perfect for our background. The example below is scanned from the book Pixar: At the museum of modern art.

By reading an article at Animation Art Conservation called "The Background Art of Kim Possible" the background artist Alan Bodner was influenced by the futuristic designs created during the 50's and 60's. Looking at some of these backgrounds I felt if we could do something like this in three dimensions that would be great. The examples below were obtained from http://kim-possible.info/index.php.

All these images are copyright Disney.