Visual Development & Concepting: Hard Surface Development

Taking in exam the last image I left, the Hard Surface I had in mind at first was a simple paper plane that could easily take off and fly around inside the airport areas as a dynamic CCTV security system and take “in-flight” small origami creatures that would directly assist the passengers and report every issue that may arise.

But I didn’t want to take a too easy and unoriginal path, so I tried to work more on its shape and features, which lead my research towards the most popular commercial aircraft build by one of the major companies like Boeing, looking at the various available and also retired aircraft photos and concepts (since the current lockdown doesn’t allow me to travel to the nearest airport).

I’ve also looked more into the newest and spoken Boeing 737 Max, focusing on the MCAS system, and the winglets design on both the Boeing 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner (previously called 7E7 during the development). But since this fictional airport is in space and connects different species of passengers to different planets and galaxies, I searched about the only commercial craft that could almost reach space and a supersonic speed (not a space shuttle), and I found one of the 2 ever build, in service, and retired aircraft that could go beyond the speed of sound, the French and British plane Concorde.

After watching documentaries about all those aircraft and more, I started making some proper sketches, still basing the idea of the “paper” like shape or features on the actual planes I researched.

I quite liked how I managed to “transform” the paper plane pin silhouette into another type of aircraft, but at this stage, I didn’t yet realize that I was already going out of the original idea for “security”, and I was focusing on the real-time lifesaver security service for passengers.

The blue-ish Safe Protector Blackbird (SPB) is a type of aircraft meant to reassemble some features coming from the actual Lockheed SR-71, also called Blackbird, the current fastest military aircraft build in the late 50s, while the red Berserk Threat Silencer Blackbird, has also some features coming from the “second Russian Concorde” Tupolev and the never produced “third American Concorde”.

But as I said, this was going out of the original idea, and because of that, this happened:

Completely not related but out of curiosity I asked my cousin (who works as a military engineer in my family’s home country) if a concept like this one was actually possible to develop in real life and said that with minor adjustments, it can even be proposed to his colleagues for a military aircraft.

Once I realized I went WAY too far with the concept, I made a step back and made basic shapes with this aircraft design.

Once again, I took as a base the pin silhouette, but I changed a few features to transform the previous commercial/military aircraft into a smartphone-sized flying CCTV that takes care of the passengers’ security from a third and less visible point of view.

Like the first attempt, the blue mini aircraft is still more passenger-focused and is often seen around the airport, while the pink (black) one can be seen only in case a threat has been spotted, and military support is required according to the current threat level measured by an actual operator that can see through the live or backed up recordings (which in real life is done by the TSA, Transport Security Administration).

According to the brief, only one Hard Surface model is required, so I focused my attention on the blue one, but both will be having an extra asset as a point of communication with the Organic model.