Propaganda

Introduction

In the second act we have a timelapse sequence, where you can imagine that for each shot, a camera is taking a picture once a year, decade or century to make a film, so the effective frame rate is like 24 century/second ( decade/sec or year/sec) for each shot.

This way we can see big changes happen in the society/culture around the train station, while never leaving the set.

One of the big things that happens is that a dictatorship takes over. Dictatorships need lots of ways to control people, so we see lots of security cameras, barbed wire, cages for crowd control, 'TSA' style scanners and gates, towers for guards (like prison towers!) etc.

The most important thing for the dictator to control is people's minds. for this they need lots and lots of propaganda....

<HTML5video width="600" autoplay="false">animatic_propaganda</HTML5video>

Types of Propaganda

Propaganda is a specialized form of art/literature/illustration; so we expect there are all these forms present in the station.

Audio/Sound

Loudspeakers in the station on high volume, chanting slogans/news/info at the helpless passengers. We'll see the speakers themselves, and the audio can have 'snips' of distorted audio. Perhaps bits of marches/national anthem etc.

2D Art

Posters, banners, etc.

Posters

Posters can be images of the dictator, or posters that illustrate some concept like 'advancement' 'freedom' 'we're all in it together!' 'defeat the enemy!' etc. etc.

Dictators

For the dictators I like to get inspired by the figures from my homeland and others:)

These guys are ruling for their entire lives, and then passing to their sons/relatives:

Timelapse means that the dictators get older! so a young dictator gets older, then his son takes over, who looks like him but different, etc.: here are some ideas:

• 

  older (father)

• 

  younger (son)

• 

  older (father)

• 

  younger (son)

• 

  dad?

• 

  son?

• 

  more dads!

• 

  more sons!

• 

  young dictator

• 

  old dictator

These images would be used in posters/portraits, with just the face of the dictator like the following - in the middle picture we see three examples: 2 tyrants, followed by one tyrant, young, middle aged, and then old:

• 

  concept portrait by Astro Leon Jong

• 

  Tyrant posters with fake writing

• 

  Trampled poster in 'timelapse' mode

Accessories

Dictators are very stylish! They love moustaches, fun facial hair, sunglasses, hats... They like to dress up in suits, military outfits, or some bizarre version of the 'native' garb of their countries.

Cartoon vs. Realism

We should try to have distorted proportions in the level of gilgamesh, but not too much: the following tyrants are too cartoony:

• 

  cool but too cartoony- the middle one might be OK

Rendering Style

To avoid an 'uncanny valley' of clashing 3d and 2d style it might be good to pick 'abstract' 'cubist' or 'futurist' styles of rendering the dictator's faces/boodies as seen in some old soviet propaganda, another good technique is to shade with bold two tone shading:

• 

  old skool is still cool (Futurist?)

• 

  two tone shading

• 

  more two tone

• 

  ok, you get the picture :)

• 

  line art-ish

• 

  other line art

• 

  'realistic' two tone style

• 

  other realistic two tone example

I prefer the two tone style/Futurist sytle to the line art one as line art can get a bit too cartoony...

Colors

For colors picking reds, yellows, browns, whites, blacks... typical propaganda color and also will fit nicely into the style

Banners

Like the Posters, Banners are typically really big, and hang down from the ceiling or on the walls, they can also have dictator faces (or not) or simply be text.

• 

  Text only banners can look awesome

• 

  banner can have face, color and some text

• 

  or a big flag and a face :)

Sizes

Horizontal Banners

Banners can be huge: biggest size is probably like the ones in the text only image, so 1-2 meters in height by 10-20 meters in width. They will be seen far away or partially. We should aim for a high resolution, but not *too* high, the width can be 6-8k, but the aspect ration means the height could be less than 1k. Let's not make the banners final until we know their shot composition

Vertical Banners

These are big but not huge: less than a meter wide, less than 10 meters tall. They hang vertically , and occupy a screen space of roughly 50 * 500 pixels. if we double the resolution we arrive at a 1k height, so somthing like 128x1024 pixes should be good.

Posters

In many shots they will be tiny, less than 200px or 100px on screen. they are going to vary in physical size, poster size which is about 1 meter wide, and 1.5 meter tall, and portrait size which can go down to a small sheet of paper. The closes we will see them is probably around a 500px square or so, resolution then should be maximum 1K and we can make small low rez versions for long shots.

Reference

Here's some idea of how far things are to the camera:

<HTML5video width="600" autoplay="false">reel_out_posters</HTML5video>

3D Art

Statues ? might be fun to sculpt.... They can be futurist or 'realistic' but they must have distorted proportions similar to gilgas (doesn't need to be long neck, but not the same as human!!!)

• 

  example statue, but we can make more abstract things.