Project: Mise-en-scene: Concept designs for space ships and sets

 These are my concept designs that will help with giving me an idea of how I should approach making the spaceships for my project. I am mainly considering the cockpit design to be the main set while the rocket ship and capsule designs will be props since they are just used to interact with space, while the cockpit is fully interacted with by the astronaut. 

Although I am making three different props/sets, really only the cockpit will be needed to be up to scale with the figure, a Stikbot, I am using as the astronaut. The astronaut will only be seen in the cockpit, so I do not need to make the main rocket and capsule up to scale.

This design is the main rocket ship. It will have two separate models: One normal scale (Cut in half for a specific shot), and one medium scale. But this might change since I have no idea if I can make a normal scale model look bigger than it actually is. But I think might be able to since the camera I am using for this project, a Logitech c920 HD, is small so I think I will be able to pull this illusion off. 

 

I am mainly basing this design off of the Gemini 8 mission rocket. I like the design since it is pretty simplistic and has colors and textures on it that I can easily recreate back at home; like the black I can recreate using electrical tape, and the engines I could simply paint some bottle caps. 

This is the design of the capsule (the head of the rocket and where the astronaut is housed). The reason why the capsule design looks different from capsule designs from other space ships is because the original narrative I had, if a full film of my project were to be made, would be about an astronaut going through a wormhole. So for my capsule design, I sort of elongated it and gave it some mass to look like a spacecraft that could withstand the forces of a wormhole. 

The name "Hammer" on the bottom of the capsule is the name of the engine the ship is using. Although not shown at all in my project, I envisioned this capsule to be propelled by nuclear pulse propulsion, or in other words, nuclear explosions. This was an old idea back in the 70s when people and scientists alike dreamed about the uses of nuclear power. Of course the idea of using nuclear explosions to propel a spacecraft has been long abandoned years ago, and looks ridiculous today, but I thought it was a very interesting idea. 

Although I said in my previous posts that I like for my film to have a sense of realism to it, I also want there to be a strand of fantasy too. Because a space ship using nuclear explosions as propulsion is an awesome idea. And I don't want to ground my film too much in realism, or else it'll get hard to be accurate to real science and physics, and it could possibly get pretty boring. 

This is the design for the cockpit. The left lever is for controlling the nuclear propulsion engine while the other lever controls the steering of the capsule.

Although as much as I like this design, I am going to have to change it because of one flaw: the distance between the two main controls are too far apart. It wouldn't make any sense for an astronaut needing to stretch their arms out just to pilot their ship. 

The set will be inside a large box, with the inside painted black to further control the lighting. But I might not do this since my room will already be incredibly dark, so I don't there's a need for me to put the set inside a box to control the lighting in a already dark room. 

I am mainly basing this design off of the interior design of the EVA Pods from 2001: A Space Odyssey. My design will be less colorful though and be more clunky and broad. 

Of course I am not aiming for the complexity of a bunch of buttons and lights for my set, but I really like the octagonal control panel, and the screens besides the main keyboard.