A little more research and thumbing it

From last time when I was debating whether drop Time Safari Inc into the cretaceous period the smouldering mess that would be the remains of the end of the cretaceous period, I decided upon just sticking with the story and going with cretaceous jungle.

So I went away and did my best to find out trees and plants that would have been about it that time period and I’ve found out there was no grass back then, but at the end of the cretaceous period angiosperms (flowering plants) were evolving and adapting to become more appealing to the various mammals and insects that ate or pollinated them thus spreading the plants seeds and enabling the plants to reproduce far more quickly which in turn increased the densities of greenery covering the world.
A handy little website where I found a nice slice of information on what was about flower and fauna wise back in the Cretaceous period
Here’s a few various plants (of a large selection of recourse material I’ve managed to gather) which were around in the cretaceous period:













































These are a few more whole looking jungle scenes as oppose to just the trees and shrubs above









Next I moved onto the altered future which was distorted by the butterfly effect as such (and I’ve just realised why the film the butterfly effect is called the butterfly effect :P)
I went through the text and tried to dig out as much info as I could that would relate to the distorted future, so here’s a summary of what I dug up:

Military dictatorship, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual.
Chemical taint to the air.
White, Gray, Blue, Orange (Time machine room but could be potential colour pallet for the world)
World of streets and people (like) chess pieces blown in a dry wind

From just that slight bit of information I’ve managed to pull out of the text it’s fairly obvious this is some kind dystopian world.

The fact that it seemed like a dictatorship sent me straight back to world war II and I began looking at the Nazi concentration camps one of which I’ve visited while back on a school trip to Germany. The camp I visited was Sachsenhausen and I can remember just being there felt really eerie and I felt really uncomfortable there, the fact that so many people had died there was obviously adding to the feeling but it was just so terrible and looking at the conditions of the prisoners made me feel so sad at how people can treat one another.
Photographs of Auschwitz





From there I began looking into prisons as the Berlin wall dividing up and entire country and the fences surrounding the concentration camps defiantly would have made the place feel like a prison and the people feel trapped and under surveillance with the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) about so keep people living in fear of stepping out of line.
Pictures of the Berlin wall





Photographs of prisons







Graffiti art by Banksy



Security cameras



While trying to ground this dystopian world in the future with links to the past as well as the present to make it a believable place which questions the audience and makes them think the world could have quite easily turned out like that. This let me into looking at modernism as extremist which view almost as it has been proven that simplifying living is a recipe for disaster.
The Pruitt-Igoe





A few other modernist buildings





I want to create a dystopian world where people living in fear of the government, constantly under surveillance like it was the norm, but then the story mentions a chemical taint to the air, which led me to look into the industrial revolution as well as factories and power plants etc, which would turn the world into a compassionless place, where there is no value placed on human life with fear ruling the lives of the population and the only thing keeping them alive is their own will to survive.
Images from the industrial revolution





Examples of industrial factories and power plants





































These are a few thumbnail sketches I drew to begin with my concept work: