Alone in the Wasteland

(AKA: What you do when you’re stuck at home and bored to tears)

So, one of the wilder things I did during the pandemic was build my own cyberpunk city to use for a music video shoot. 

The bones of the project just uses completely randomly pieces of cardboard and other crap from my garage, randomly glued together into shapes that looked vaguely building-like, and spray-painted gray and black to look somewhat on-purpose.

(Party cups and left over toilet paper tubes just add to the aesthetic)

The next thing I did was add dramatic uplighting, because let’s face it... everything looks cooler and bigger and more intense if it’s uplit. Chunks of leftover LED strips work really well, and it’s really easy to isolate just the blue circuits. It creates the illusion of scale which is important for any model to look large.

Of course, no city is complete without BLINKY LIGHTS (and I’m sure you noted already there’s some blinky action on top of the towers here) so I spent a bunch of time googling blinking light circuits and experimenting with them on a breadboard before ultimately extending the wires to glue them to the buildings themselves.

(I  got a basic electronics kit on Amazon for most of the components)

Then, I put white LED strips inside of the bigger buildings (a little trickier to isolate the W circuits but not impossible!) and poked holes to simulate lit windows for ultimate sci-fi street cred.

At this stage, things were looking pretty legit.

The “final” touch was to create a virtual billboard to go in one of the sections. I had an old first gen ipod touch that I made a little slot for and cobbled together a video loop for. (Don’t worry it’s not permanently installed or anything -- it just slides in and out.)

... and of course what dystopian future is complete without flying cars...?

A little platform for a hotwheels car to go on (after it’s all painted green of course for the greenscreen.)

Insert some practical effects, some video-editing magic, and VOILA! ... it’s CYBERPUNK TIME BAYBEE.

I was inspired by a post on here from literally years ago about making a city out of garbage and LED’s and decided to take it to the next level. I’m sure at some point I could save myself the trouble by learning how to 3D model but this was so much more fun.