Acetio | Blogma

Some great examples of retro-futurist "envisionings"

The site: http://ru-2061.livejournal.com/ is devoted to a drawing contest where artists imagine a planet Mars colonized by a thriving Soviet space program in the year 2061.

Not all of the work is good, but some is very good. The second round of the contest, "The Stone Belt" seems to have attracted more talent than the first.

The page is in Russian, but Chrome translates it pretty well.

Russian art is always fascinating to me because the default color palette is just a little different from the American one. It's hard to put my finger on it, but if you look at, say images taken by Russian satellites:

the blues are shifted a bit toward green and the reds shifted a bit toward orange, in comparisons to the NASA photos which are usually "color-corrected" so that the blues, reds, and greens are fully saturated.

This week's Photoshop Phriday at SomethingAwful imagines magazine covers from the distant future.

The assignment was to study the style of Terry Gilliam, who was adept at making animations with a minimum of actual animating (note how he never bothers to animate anyone's feet). So I did virtual cutouts in AfterEffects, reducing color to bring the file sizes down, and made this. (1.5MB)

The Future Stinks from Matt Slaybaugh on Vimeo.

In February 2005 or so I wrote a little song, "The Future Stinks" testing some of my theories about what makes a tune catchy.

And some time after that I created this video for the song in AfterEffects. The man lip-synching is Nikola Tesla.