Space Tourism Evaluation

The project brief was to produce a multimedia campaign that promotes space tourism in our solar system and beyond. We were asked to create a poster advertising campaign and work in a small team to plan, film and edit a short commercial to promote space tourism.

To start with I created a simple retro style poster on Adobe Illustrator featuring the planet mars and a rocket flying around it. This exercise was just a practice to get to know how to use the tools on Illustrator and to develop the retro sci-fi look. I created this without any research into the retro look. However, thanks to the grainy texture that I layered over the top using multiply on the transparency options so that it blended into the image I think it turned out well and looked very retro. I used this technique for most of my later posters.

To help influence my space tourism poster I began researching 1950/60s science fiction art. I collected a range of film posters comic book/magazine covers and pages and any retro sci-fi art that interested me, so I could compare their similarities (the things they had in common that made them look vintage) and so I could pick out details from them that I would include in my own poster. I mainly focused on collecting authentic 1950s to 60s sci-fi art rather than retro style posters made recently because I wanted to show my own interpretation of the style rather than a copy from someone else’s interpretation.

This research helped me to create convincingly authentic looking sci-fi themed, 60s style posters because I was able to incorporate things I picked up on from comparing the images I collected into my designs. I found that the art is often quite simplistic or stylised, even the more realistic ones tend to represent textures with flat colours. The colours are usually bright but toned down, and the visualisations of future life are often naïve and flawed scientifically. The font/lettering is usually very bold and graphic often featuring perspective and shadows/3D enhancements. 

For the project we worked in groups to collaborate ideas and base each of our individual work on a collective theme. In my group (me Tyrell and Kieran) we brainstormed a few main ideas for the destination we would promote space tourism to. We decided that our planet would be purple due to the colour of the earth, the rock and the plants. It would be a beautiful paradise with the large majority of the surface being completely natural and untouched. We called the planet Actaeon after a Greek hero. It is named after a mythological character because all the planets in our solar system are named after gods and we thought we’d keep it consistent. With this brief I created my posters to promote space tourism to Actaeon. I think I was successful in creating posters that made this fictional destination seem inviting and real but at the same time true to the retro sci fi look. I made the surface look familiar by basing it on amazing natural places on Earth and also making it look mysterious and unusual with the purple coloured plants, purple rock formations and luxurious turquoise ponds and rivers to add a sense of curiosity and wonder. I used original 50s/60s art as a basis for some of my posters, drawing over things such as 60s futuristic spaceships in Illustrator to get the retro look. I took colours straight from the pictures I collected using the eyedropper tool to use in my own work. And I downloaded specially designed retro futuristic style fonts for the headers and captions. I created the caption “Purple Paradise” which suits the planet Actaeon perfectly. All these elements helped to create a successful advertisement for the planet following the retro futurism theme. If I were to spend more time on the poster designing project I may have incorporated some of my design sketches of animal inhabitants of the planet to make the destination seem even more real and inviting.

In my group we also created a promotional commercial for space tourism to our planet. We visited Sutton park to record footage and take pictures of areas we thought best resembled our planet. We were not completely successful in this as we did not collect as much footage as we wanted, the weather was cold, so the lighting was dull and there were not many trees with leaves because it was winter. When we reviewed the footage a lot of it was of a low standard as the panning was wobbly. However, we were able to put together a reasonable number of clips in the end because I found some pictures I had taken of Sutton park a few years ago and we cut out parts of some footage that was wobbly.

I created a basic storyboard for the order the clips would go in, Kieran uploaded them, edited the photos in photoshop to make them purple with an orange sky using the gradient map then he imported them and the other videos into Adobe Premiere. Tyrell’s job was to design our company logo which we called Actaeon Industries and put together some background space themed music. I put the logo onto the film at the start with a landscape scene in the background as it fades on and made the music run throughout. I then layered the voiceover on and adjusted the volume of it, so it came out over the music. I also made the rest of the videos have a purple filter over them and I perfected the lighting. Once we had finished the basics we decided to add more visual techniques to it, so I created a screen that showed the temperature and direction with little graphics I designed in Illustrator. I made the background transparent and exported it as a jpeg, so it could be layered over one of the clips. We used greenscreen footage of a CGI spaceship to add on to our film to give it more of a sci-fi feel, this worked well but it took a lot of time to get it to fit with the scenery and not go over the border.  Kieran edited the logo on Adobe After effects to make a little animation where the rocket design span around the planet part. I added this on at the end as a conclusion to our commercial.

If I were to change anything about the space tourism commercial it would be to redo the filming part of the process so that we got better shots and a wider range of interesting camera techniques and positionings.