Prologue
This week’s task was to gather visual inspiration for the Apollo Space Programme. This could be from a lot of different mediums, such as books, movies, games, anywhere we can find inspiration really.
Movies
There is a good range of movies to draw inspiration from, many grounded in reality while others go a bit beyond what we are capable of in this day and age. What I noticed about most if not all of them is the lack of abtract colours, the execption being movies like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy, since they tailor to a wide audience. Movies like Interstellar or the Martian have a more scientific background to them and it keeps them cemented in reality of what we could really see in the next 20 years.
T.V Series
The Expanse is a tv series found on Amazon Prime’s streaming service, the series has a lot of good inspirational points to look at. The actual poster itself has a lot going on in it and what I found really nice about the poster was it almost looks like each ring represents the planets of our solar system, although not all of them fit into the image, but the biggest giveaway would be the orange ring is Mars, as it is the 4th planet from the sun.
Games
This area is my absolute soft spot, and starting it off we have the Mass Effect series. This is perhap one of, if not the best scifi universe out there. While no way related to Apollo or 20th centuary space flight, they do make use to reference it in the games. It is also even referenced the new Mass Effect Will Continue teaser that came out in 2020. The colour scheme used in the new Legendary Edition predicts the 2 morality choices in the game, Paragon being blue and Renegade in red. These make a great contrast to look at.
Next up is Stellaris, a 4X grand strategy. Stellaris’ gameplay revolves around space exploration, managing an empire, diplomacy, trade, and space warfare with other space-faring civilizations. A game with a lot of freedom and customization. Stellaris goes for a really relaxed colour scheme, one that I feel really helps to immerse you.
Halo is a series of games I’m sure many people have heard of. Perhaps one of my all time favourites. One thing I will say about Halo is the massive use of the colour blue in the series. All the main menu’s from the original 3 games had that use of blues.
Moodboards
I went onto Pinterest and made 4 moodboards, one for each of the games above and one for the Apollo programme in general.
Gathering reference images and creating moodboards to help sway your direction is a great process to start with. It is a process I’d recommend to people when they are feeling lost on what art direction to go for. I found this task extremely helpful as I had many different ideas stuck in my head for my project.