Designing the Future: Diegetic Sculpture & Literary Adaptation in Speculative Fiction Cinema

Abstract

esearched the topic of cinema design from conception to post-production. In making shortfilms, I tried to answer fundamental questions about the construction of digital narrative environments: How can sculptural practices be leveraged to create diegetic artifacts? How do visionary writers, artists, and architects conceive designs for the future? How are literarynarratives translated into cinematic narratives? Investigating such topics has driven my design research, gathering information by reading literature and by traveling to sites around the country to experience narrative environments first hand. Using photography, drawing, painting, andsculpture to process the information, I move into the pre-production stages of film development by scriptwriting. Essentially, scripts are early prototypes that enable the visualization of specific scenes and shots. Later prototypes consist of short videos. Each of the films I’ve produced as a graduate student is connected through visual aesthetic, genre, and theme. The earlier filmsdirectly inform the last two films I’ve produced as a part of my research: The Arconaut andLiminal. In addition to including links to videos in the appendix, I have also included links tosamples of the narrative writing process for Liminal and photography collected in the earlystages of pre-production.