Can Control started out as an attempt to produce a custom Void One spray can that I could 3D print and paint up. I wanted to see how my letters looked in a true 3D environment with real lighting.
After modelling the can I started to add a backdrop for some promo shots and it snowballed into constructing a whole city with buildings modeled from all of the estates I grew up on as a kid. It’s not meant to be hyper realistic, more a caricature of my home town in all it’s depravity.
As I familiarised myself with Blender for the first time I thought it would be cool to do a simple camera sweep around the can, check out some other features. A rabbit hole that turned a few shorts into a whole short film, complete with graffiti arrow asteroids attacking the city, the city hitting back with fighter jets and transforming post box cannons, and everything getting nuked at the end. Basically everything gets devastated like a cheap 90’s disaster movie.
I’m also considering a giant graff mech emerging from the ruins, I want it all, but I need to sign off some of the establishing shots and early work before I take on more. I want to approach that at the end cause I know my modelling skills are constantly improving, and I kind of like that you’ll be able to see that evolve in the final cut. The early modelling is based on letters I’ve been dropping for years on walls, but at the end there will be a whole new set of letters rising from the ashes, and a second can. I’m going to be sketching a lot more pieces in 3D from now on so I’d like to show that evolution through this project.
I’ve been building a custom Void One AR app in Unity that’s now nearing a 1.0 release. I want to turn my paintings into fully interactive experiences. To support the app, I needed to create an interactive book of images that the a.i would recognise and trigger from, all of the programming developed from the book would then be applied to real world environments.
Can Control became that book, and in many ways is the culmination of 30 years of professionally fucking around with technology. I’m not ready to give too much away about the tricks I have in the pipeline, but this will be a truly 21st century ‘pop up’ book. Featuring customisable cans, a real time comic / animation, a graff inspired mobile game and entire 3D rendered scenes from the animation to be explored and interacted with via your devices. I’m literally rewriting the book.
Below is the most recent cut of the introduction and first scene showcasing the can.There’s a little teaser of some of the later vfx to give you a flavour of the direction, but it’s still very much a work in progress and in no way reflects the final edit.
Can Control Test Render // MAD XR Limited // Track: Blunt Fusion by Kursa
Can Control // AR Test Footage_
Void One // UK 