General Cyberpunk Research

Cyberpunk meaning: A genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology.

Here is my detailed mind map that I created for Cyberpunk. I decided to split the words up into categories that I feel are the best for them. I made a category which is based upon the environment and what it would look like which I feel was a good idea as this is one of the most important aspects. I feel that the word cyberpunk is generally a good word to have to start with as it is a growing genre and has a lot of information about it therefore making it easier to gain knowledge about it which can help me gather more words.

Moodboards

In this first moodboard I wanted to go for an environment one as I felt that was a good start since the environment is very important in cyberpunk games and it is always either very colourful/bright due to the neon colours or dark and gloomy if their in the urban/low life area of the game/film. I chose these pictures as I feel they clearly represent the environment of the cyberpunk genre and also show off a lot of detail which will also come in handy later on.

For this moodboard I decided to focus a bit more towards the characters and computers so I decided to label the moodboard hackers. I did this as most of the cyberpunk movies and games always contain at least one hacker and I figured it would be a good choice to do a moodboard on this sort of character. I chose images based on the scene in which the computers were placed, some of these are in a control room while others are more augmented realisty in the sense that they are 3D. I wanted to chose most of these pictures as I feel they clearly show what a hacker could look like but also the type of scene/setting in which they would be in while doing the hacking.

This moodboard was focused more towards the films depicting cyberpunk, I chose a few films in which to gether pictures for this moodboard and those films were: RoboCop, The Matrix, Ready Player One and Tron Legacy. I feel that these four films are some of the most well known films out there today that depict the cyberpunk genre very well. I chose the pictures for this moodboard based upon what they were depicting, for example some of the pictures are quite colourful while others are quite dark and gloomy this is good as it shows a contrast in style and will look better by having them both on the same moodboard. Most of the pictures that I chose for this moodboard depict the characters that were featured in the films, I did this as it’s a good way to gain more knowledge of what the characters could look like.

For this moodboard I collected images of characters from cyberpunk games/films and overall concept art of what characters in the cyberpunk genre could look like. I did this as I felt it was necessary to gather a varied amount of images of characters as this would give me a better idea of what they look like and also will help me with my ideas generation if I choose to create any characters. Thiis moodboard is also varied in colour as there are some brighter pictures and some darker pictures this is good as it shows a contrast between the characters showing which ones prefer brighter colours and which ones prefer the darker colours.

This final moodboard is based on the environment once again but for this one I decided to try and go for a more dark theme so it could show the other side of the cyberpunk world, the low life urban area. I did this as I felt it would be a good idea and it would also be a contrasting moodboard to the other one I created earlier. The majority of the pictures on this moodboard are dark and gloomy as I feel that this is a good depiction of the word that I was trying to get pictures for, I did throw in a couple of brighter pictures as these pictures were also clearly showing off an urban area of a game/film scene.

Further Research

As well as creating the moodboards for my research I decided to do some further research as I wanted to get some more ideas for when I come to create my own, I gathered some images off of ArtStation as that is a good site to use since there is a lot of art on there and a lot based on Cyberpunk which is very helpful.

All 3 of these pictures are based on cities and the environment and that is because I will be creating an environment for my project because I feel more comfortable making environment art. The first image shows an overview of a large city, it shows some large buildings and a varying amount of colours that are both bright and dull, this is a good colour scheme as it draws attention to each part of the design and allows us to see everything, despite these dull colours on some of the buildings they may have a brighter colours on them somewhere as this can help with the lighting of the design.

The second image shows us a building that could be a bar or a pub but its from an above angle therefore allowing us to see a lot of the area around it but not actually inside of the building, however by doing this we can see more of the environment and what the area actually looks like which is handy for creating environment art, if I was to use this piece to help me with my project it could come in very handy as I would be able to see more of the environment above the building and therefore would be able to gain more knowledge about it.

The third image also shows another city overview but this one is a new city and is also a new angle which is very handy as I can see different parts of the city this way. The environment in this image mainly show a few larger buildings which are the main points of interest of this image as they will draw the most attention and these therefore contain the more vibrant neon colours as to draw that attention, however the smaller buildings down below also feature some bright colours but because they are smaller they won’t get noticed too much. It’s still a good image and can come in helpful for when I create my artwork as I could use some help with designing buildings so I could use these as references and combine multiple buildings to create one which is a unique version and is my own.