Suburban RED
The world of Suburban RED is that of the dream-world and how in dreams things aren't always as they seem to be in waking life. Within the dream, objects and places and people and animals seem to shift and take on double meanings, or the present is suddenly the past or the future. I wanted this kind of story fluidity to be part of this world. This is a theme which I've explored in much of my work - the bringing together of and blending of the past, the now, with the future.
I imagined this world being sort of like a vision of the future as dreamed up in in the past - a 1980s version of the future perhaps. The interesting thing about the way artists create futuristic designs is that they often make the rectangular things rounded and the rounded things angled. Therefore I wanted to feature some of the appliances and products in the film, like the computer and the television as circles and spheres instead of rectangles and squares. These served for a retro look, as spherical televisions and monitors have been a thing of the 1960s futuristic imagination. The one featured on the lower right was assemble using a fishbowl that was painted brown on the inside and then fastened to an old desk lamp stand that had push buttons.
At the time that I was developing the scene in the upper right - with the vertical television - it was 2015 and vertical televisions and monitors were not a consumer product and were mostly used in places like airports or television news programs. With the cell phone quickly becoming the way that people create images and take video, the vertical framing has become very prevalent. Monitors that can be swiveled into a vertical position are now becoming available only recently. I wanted to mark this change of the times in the film. What is interesting to me is how the vertical monitor is perfect for the human body standing alone, but it is not so perfect for capturing the landscape or our surroundings. This seems sort of telling for our times.