I will be attending and speaking at OFFF Barcelona 2011 in June of this year, which I’m really looking forward to. Not only is it the second time I’ll be visiting Europe, but it will be an excellent chance to meet up with people in that part of the world whom I only know through the web. Can’t wait.
As part of the festival, the OFFF team will be releasing a book based on the theme of the event, entitled Year Zero. The above image is what I created for them, playing on the idea of a modern day digi-pop version of the all-seeing eye, wrapped in an 80s rock vibe. I even went as far as to create a companion piece, the ’80s magazine advertisement promoting a television that “thinks for you”. It’s based on a real ad. Yeah, creepy.
I had lots of fun working on this one, even though it took me a little while to really get the concept visualized. The inspiration for the main piece was simple, I wanted a kind of Bladerunner atmosphere mixed with the typography from the poster for They Live.
I spent a great deal of time messing around in Illustrator, trying different color schemes, layouts and elements as I tried to find the proper combination before moving to Photoshop to assemble things. One of the errors I tend to make is moving to Photoshop too early without having a good direction in mind, so this time I put in the hours to ensure that wouldn’t happen. Here is a sampling of my vector sketches.
That final sketch was the one that set me on the right path, so I began putting things together in Photoshop where I added all my lighting, effects and textures. The one elements that I wanted to spend some time on was that digital eye, it had to look sinister and big, and ultimately look electronic. I used a hexagon pattern I built a while ago in Illustrator and used a simple eye design as a rough guide. This took a little time to get the curves right, but pretty fun when it all came together.
The final elements added to this design were actually the people. I wanted something to add a sense of scale to this thing, to make it look larger than life. I already had the staircase built, so the silhouettes were added to make everything feel far bigger and ominous. I spent a crazy about of time adding spot lighting and glows to this one because the pyramid structure itself isn’t made of very many shapes, and I wanted some interest in there.
So, if you are attending OFFF Barcelona this year look for this in the Year Zero book. I’ll also be looking to get posters made of this in the near future once I have it properly re-scaled for the larger format.
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