Time travel experiment — toy edition
Recreated Doc Brown’s Back to the Future experiment with a toy DeLorean.
Sometimes we have to go beyond mere rectangles, design thinking, and everything in between. If my calculations are correct, you will be reading this precisely after my very first-time travel attempt.
Back to the Future has had a big impact on my childhood, and I was always fascinated by Doc Brown’s little creation.
As kids, we have vivid imaginations, and I wanted to design a car that my younger self would have loved.
The miniature effect’s look and feel was inspired by tilt-shift photography. The goal was to make it feel like an architectural model, where time travel is realistically possible.
Simulations were done with a mix of different production pipleines with the most challenging one beig the flames at a whopping raw simulation size of 200GB! (not 1.21TB)
I reconstructed the basic idea of the scene in real life and tried to record it, in the most natural way. The cinematography of how the shot was filmed was greatly informed by this and later rebuilt using a finicky Camera rig that’s being driven with various noises to give it a more natural feel.
The sound of time
The most underappreciated aspect of time travel is its sound. I collaborated with my good friend Genc Rashiti and we used a wide range of generated as well as self-recorded sound effects.
Some are as simple as a sliding thumb over an iPhone’s microphone. Others are more sophisticated.
All these effects combined gave me a result that took me right back to my childhood. I hope you will too.
Thanks for your time and I’ll see you in the future.
Special thanks to Genc Rashiti for his support with SFX, Louis Manjarres for his continuous feedback, and my beloved sister Katrin for her help on the camera work.
You can find the Original Case Study here.
