Tonight I went by Iris and Nero’s place and watched the Speed Racer movie. Which is fucking amazing, it’s one long eyegasm, and think I need to see it again on a bigger screen than their TV. Before the movie, I spent some time pondering uniforms for Parallax.
I started with intent of redesigning the Federacracy outfits. Tried some asymmetrical stuff because I feel like a good Space Pilot outfit is often dramatically asymmetrical. I really like the swirly accent on the hip pocket in the upper right on this first page and might play with that some more…
But I ended up going with the same blue jacket with two light stripes down the front center that I had in the pitch. Just couldn’t think of anything that worked better. I may try another round later. (Looking at where I ended up with the Union flight jackets, I think I might want to either stay with straight stripes, or maybe try curves/circles as a design motif so as to contrast with the Union triangles.)
And then I shifted over to the other side, who the asymmetrical uniforms worked a lot better on – they’re the Creepy Post-Human Space Goths.
There are a lot of ways to make a coat interestingly asymmetrical. I did some image searching for inspiration and think I finally got something good, as marked with arrows at the bottom of that page up there. (Note to self: maybe tweak it so that the three buttons are in a line.)
Tried a profile and back view, think it works. Needs a little more red on the back but I can’t decide how yet. Will see how it goes when I do a second round on the pitch bible art.
In summation, I hate costume design.
I still need to redesign the spaceships, too. I’m not happy with the existing drawings of the Whalesong and the Spinward, or with the Tactical Pants or the Combat Armatures – I’m probably gonna completely drop that link to its roots in my guest strip for Gabe’s comic in favor of something that better fits the themes of the show. There’s something better waiting for me to find it before I can do presentation boards for the pilot.
It’s coming together, though. Nick and I have been tossing it back and forth, and we now have enough A and B plot ideas that we can shuffle them together into about a season’s worth of single-paragraph synopses of episodes.
If the pitch becomes A Thing then I will probably be asking a few friends if they are interested in taking some money to iterate on costume and ship designs for a bit. Because I feel like I want to do this the way George Lucas made Star Wars: by getting a bunch of awesome people to contribute to a big ol’ cauldron of stone soup.