Building Alliances - Environment Visual Research/ Mood Boards (06/10/24)

The director of our project asked us to make some mood boards on our environments so we could discuss our ideas and get feedback

We decided that our game was going to focus more on environments rather than people. We liked the idea of the player exploring the world doomed by humanity and their use of microplastics. Humanity is very near extinction with the few left barely surviving or have fallen to microplastics becoming these mutated beasts. Our main focus of our game is to show the effects and dangers of microplastics and how drastically they can change environments and effect the food chain. We discussed that many smaller and weaker species would be completely wiped out due to these changes. Some species would have adapted to survive leading them to undergo mutations such as an increase in size.

Mood Boards

The environment I chose was the junkyard and my research will be focused on how people contribute to the microplastic content in junkyards and land fill. I want to focus on how microplastics are made and how plastic waste (such as water bottles) degrade and form microplastics.

Junkyard

My main source of inspirations for these mood boards is Wall - E (Pixar, 2008). In Wall - E, the entire Earth has become a wasteland due to corporate greed and environmental neglect. The world has become unliveable and humans were evacuated leaving a single robot to compress trash and salvage parts. This plot is similar to our game's plot and it has similar themes of loneliness in it too. In our game, humanity is near extinction with most survivors turning into terrible humans and some on the path of mutating due to microplastics effecting their body. Both Junkyards and land fill will have a high concentration of microplastics due to how most of the waste is plastic and is left to fester here. I liked the idea that maybe the few remaining survivors that have their sanity intact can no longer enter these junkyards as it's released too many microplastics that it's now unliveable. I had 2 ideas on how this could be presented:

• Microplastics produce carbon dioxide and too much of it in the atmosphere can make it unbreathable. The burning of plastics also produce a gas known as carbon monoxide (a colourless, odourless and tasteless gas that can be fatal if inhaled). This idea aimed to create a bubble surrounding the junkyards that choked any creature (this may possible include the mutants) that dared enter. A lot of the images in my mood board include this very vibrant green colour. The correct hue of green can be used to symbolise rot, decay and toxic materials. 
• My next idea involves using muted and dull colours to create this wasteland of an environment. A place where you'd take one look and think 'that's doomed'. In this idea, instead of being choked, there's a storm. A stormed so heavily populated by microplastics that it scratches and cuts at the flesh of living creatures making way for the mutations that will eventually take over their mind. No one enters here because this storm will cut them to pieces before they can make it back out.

I plan to discuss both of these ideas with my team to get their feedback.

Real Life Junkyards

I created another mood board that solely focuses on real world trash and junk yards to help me to stylize the examples of trash when it comes to concepting and designing my environment.

Reference List

WALL - E, 2008. [Film]. Andrew Stanton. California: Pixar Animation Studios. [Accessed 6 October 2024].