Tuesday, June 10, 2008

>"Criss Cross"

"Over the past 15 years," Scott Robertson says, "I have designed many production and concept bicycles for a variety of companies and myself. My professional experience with bicycle design began with the designing of advanced composite bike frames for Kestrel, where I had been granted an internship between my fifth and sixth terms of study at Art Center. Since then I have continued to design frames for Kestrel and others.

"During 2001, I had the good fortune of being asked to design a series of advanced concept bikes for the film 'Minority Report.' The bikes were going to be ridden by extras through many of the street scenes. Twelve fully functioning, futuristic bikes were built for the film but only one is seen in the finished film. If you watch really, really closely you might see it through a window for about half a second, being ridden by a newspaper delivery boy. Oh well, the designs were still very fun to do. The bike you see here is not from the film but is an evolution of the types of bikes I had done for that project. All of the bikes I designed were rendered in Photoshop over side-view line sketches I had done. I had always wanted to do a bike rendering that had a bit more dramatic lighting and perspective to it than I usually do for typical industrial design work. What you see here is the result. I used all of the layering abilities and path functions in Photoshop to help me achieve a fairly high level of finish with this piece. I'm sure some of you might be wondering, 'How does that front wheel turn?' The way it works, in theory, is that the front fork is a kind of diamond-shape when viewed from above. This allows for the front wheel to turn left and right from the center hub pivot. The front wheel is pulled left or right via a closed-loop cable system that runs through the frame."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Arthur, this contraption would make good "tchotchke," perhaps as a symbolic Nazi-chasing apparatus in a corner of Wiesenthal's office. Alternatively, one could take it for a spin, wearing a Harley belt buckle, or some other complementary doodad.