Designing Falling

I actually designed the New Sydney Harbour Bridge once, did you know that? Back when I was first writing the book I was very particular about how I wanted the bridge to look as it exists in Dale, Barry and Vicki’s time of 2037.

With my then-fledging graphic design skills in full swing and access to the right software, I finally graduated from pencil and pen sketches to actual… not schematics, exactly – I’m not an engineer – but elevation and plan views of the pylons, span and deck from every angle.

It was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the entire decades-long project, but it wasn’t until very late in the process that I (luckily) realised how much it was working against me.

I’d become so enamoured with the dimensions, scale, contours and colours that when it came time to describe the bridge in the story I fell into a fatal trap. Over the course of three insufferable pages I drew every square inch of it in words, overloading way too much detail for any reader to absorb. In the LMR, I realised a much better way to tell you about it was in simile, which I detailed here.

But taking those rudimentary Illustrator files I’d made so many years before and working with a professional artist to turn them into 3D reality for the final photo you can find inside Falling’s pages was great fun;

It started with my plans;

He first turned it into a very groovy little hand illustration;

And then into a cool comp of the final structure from a new angle, complete with weathering effects and everything;

Of course it’s not 100 percent accurate. You can see the bottom of the piles are different at one end than the other, and the supports under the span are sprouting from nothing at the near end. Plus, the platforms on which you board the cable car ride are way too low compared to the level of the highway – in the book it’s an elevator ride to the loading platform.

But it was very cool to see it complete and alive, so to speak. One of the most exciting things he produced was the .obj file of the final design to bring into the VFX software – that’s a 3D representation you can turn and flip to look at from any angle, and if you’re interested enough you can download it right here (beware, it’s a big file).

If you write a novel with a visual element that’s as critical to the story as the new bridge is in Falling, I heartily recommend investing in decent visual development to see how it would really look.

Fun fact; in moving files to and from folders on my computer that were years and years old, I mistakenly deleted a lot of the original ones I’d drawn years before and lost them forever.

Fact that’s more fun; it was no fun.