In June 2004 we went on holiday to Australia. The photos were shared on my web site, crafted hand coded pages in the days before I used movable-type to blog. One day, I may move them into the main blog but for now they still live in their own little folder at http://www.steveroot.co.uk/australia/. Amongst the requisite family holiday photos is an aerial photo of Sydney taken from a helicopter flight.
This is ‘Deco by Night’, an image created by visual designer Albert Keifer. If you look really closely you can see our holiday picture in that image…. no I struggled too. The nice chap emailed a series of images to show me…
So here’s our original holiday photo. The city of Sydney, it’s wide blue river, Opera House, distinctive bridge and some of the email Albert sent asking if he could use the image.
I am an illustrator, visualiser and I was approached yesterday to enter in this contest. I had the shape lying around and started working on rendering it from different angles and see how I could build an atmosphere. I was coming to a stage where I felt it needed some nice atmospheric background city to put this monumental shape in its correct feel of ‘being very big and aloft’.
So I started a Google Image search on birds eye view and that’s how I came across your Sydney image. It immediately struck a chord and I went on to integrate it into the picture. I did not want recogniseable features since this is supposed to be a futuristich ‘somewhere’ place and a landmark building like the opera house would immediately distract from that and root it back to a well known place. That’s why I started to do a quick manipulation (which is also part of what I do for a living) and that’s how this image ended up the way it is now.
I asked nicely if I could post it on my blog (OK, it’s taken almost 2 years for me to post, but I’ve finally got to it!) so he emailed me some of the interim images to show how the steps used to crate the image.
Click on the images to see them full size, you’ll probably need to do that to see the detail of the changes
The first image is ‘the-beach’ which is used for the skyline and low sun.
The second image is ‘the-city-base-added’, click and see the full size image and you can see how it’s been flipped, cropped and laid on top of the first image.
In the third image ‘city-remodeled’ you can see how Sydney has been transformed into a generic city, losing the landmarks of the harbour bridge and opera house.
Finally, the computer generated image of futuristic chrome petal shapes is the top layer.
When you go on a family holiday and your car gets a longer holiday than you do, you just know something didn’t go to plan.
I then remembered the ‘Mars Milk’. I guess I was staying at Nan and Granddad’s for a weekend. We’d gone shopping and I asked if we could buy the ‘Mars Milk’. I didn’t understand what Nan was trying to tell me at the time, that the Mars chocolate bar was an advert for Mars and the milk was normal milk. I liked it enough to ask for it again though. Several years later, and Mars flavoured milk appeared on the supermarket shelves.