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....

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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 :)

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:

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  older (father)

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  younger (son)

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:

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  concept portrait by Astro Leon Jong

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  Tyrant posters with fake writing

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  Trampled poster in 'timelapse' mode

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:

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  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:

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  old skool is still cool

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  two tone shading

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  more two tone

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  ok, you get the picture :)

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  line art-ish

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  other line art

I prefer the two tone style 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.

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  Text only banners can look awesome

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  banner can have face, color and some text

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  or a big flag and a face :)

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!!!)