FMP Idea Dev: Futur-ish City in a Cliff

Currently still in the exciting over-ambitious phase, Futur-ish City in a Cliff (to get a better brand soon, promise) has changed a lot since the initial idea came about but is continually getting more refined and more interesting but has got to the stage now where the major over-arching idea is fairly solid. Elliott Pacel and I have been mulling over our FMP ideas for a while now bouncing things off each other and trying to find that thing that we wanted to do for our FMP, always have the possibility of working together for a project at the back of our minds.

This image has been floating around the internet... its photoshopped.

The above image was the inspiration for Elliott's idea to make a temple on a rock and as a fan of harsh but beautiful contrasts between natural and man made, such as this, I latched on to the idea. I had been working on a concept of a bunker being lived in by squatters having a great contrast between the militaristic, industrial building and the soft comfortable squatter's dream; the Pinterest board is here. I had started to explore the idea of a cave at the end of the bunker. A thought to combine the ideas so that from the cave being lived in (my bunker idea) you could see the temple (Elliott's idea) came about. We ran with it...

Some of my super rough thumbnails. Still working out how to best display them.

The idea currently is to create a city built into a cliff with a super modern, wealthy, minimalist, futurist area and a slum, homemade, over-populated area. This comparison is a very common one but we want to really push this feeling of contrast to the next step. Places like Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai and Dubai currently show this contrast from ultra rich to ultra poor however they are often such huge cities that this change gets lost and there is often a gradual, natural change. What we will do is make this contrast clearer. At the moment much of the idea is to make a vista with two main detailed areas but as usual these ideas are open to lots of change and when we hit the "be realistic you fool" phase are likely to change.

Daniel Dociu's awesome painting that vaguely resembles some of what's currently in my brain.

I want to try and work on the design work while I don't have a computer in the evenings, try and have a lot of design work down and a lot of idea exploration just with pencil and paper. When I get back from travelling around Germany I will try and take these ideas into a couple of mood paintings and more refined concepts. While I'm with my sketchbook I am also planning to do a couple of story boards of possible flythroughs, maybe some brand identity stuff.

Still gathering reference and ideas we recently thought that it would be interesting to think about what a British slum would look like and are trying to find some typically British cultural identifiers.

British Cultural Identifier Pinterest Board

Overall Project Pinterest Board