Lewis Punton Invisible Cities

OGR

Anastasia

Argia

Armilla

Despina

Ersila

Esmerelda

Fedora

Isauras

Morianas

Octavia

Phyllis

Sophriana

Tamara

Zenobia

Zirma

Diomira

Baucis

Thekla

Leonia

Chosen City - Leonia

The City of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets , wash with just unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened this, listening to the last minute jingles from the most up to date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterdays Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopaedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonias opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonias true passion is really, as they say, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and there task of removing the residue of yesterdays existence is surrounded by a respected silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further. Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuge. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the overflow increases and the piles rise higher, becomes stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonias talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentation, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surround leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterdays sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and all of its days and years and decades. Leonias rubbish would invade the world, if, from beyond the final quest of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuge in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonias boundaries, is covered in craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle. The greater its height grows, the more the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can, an old tyre, an unravelled wine flask, if it rolls towards leonia is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain the reject, mingling with the past of the neighbouring cities finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range, cancelling every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. In the nearby cities they are already, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory, expand, and drive the new street cleaners still further out.

Exterior Influence Map

Interior Influence Map

Mission Statement

When deciding upon my city I was looking for a strong narrative opportunity to help me give my city more of a character, and I felt that the piling walls of rubbish supporting Leonia could help me do that. I want my city to feel extremely modern and well kept but with the presence of a monster that’s hiding the lower classes of its civilisation in the lower levels of the city amongst yesterdays disposed goods. I really liked the idea of the city worshipping the street cleaners and I feel that this could be a really good opportunity to give the piles of rubbish more of a reputation, as being something that city are ashamed of and cant wait to get rid of rather than simply inanimate objects. With this in mind I feel like the inhabitants of the city would be extremely upper class and bare little remorse for the damage they have done to the land, in turn making the city scape seem even more vast and arrogant as it rises from the neglected earth beneath and towers over the civilians that couldn’t afford to upgrade their living quarters, and so live amongst yesterdays forgotten objects. Although my initial ideas for my city and its ‘personality’ may seem complex I want to keep the structures more simplistic and bold and create more complex shapes for the piles of rubbish to further push the idea of a drastic change occurring in a short space of time. I feel that their would be little difference in the commercial tower blocks and the homes of the upper class, as the city seems like its racing to be the most modern it can be. It seems from the description that the city bares a hidden mind set for wealth and greed which could separate them further from the characters who live amongst the lower levels of the city and need to grovel to survive amongst the trash. Leonia could possibly be seen as a literal and physical hierarchy of wealth which I really want to convey in my designs.

Developed Thumbnails

Colour Pallete

Links

Film Reviews http://lewispuntonanimation.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Film%20Review Maya Tutorials http://lewispuntonanimation.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Maya%20tutorial Digital Painting http://lewispuntonanimation.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/digital%20painting