Saturday, May 19, 2007

"The Phone Call"



For our final vis dev project, we were given the short story, "The Phone Call" and asked to design the main character, and his office in two different lighting schemes. The story is about a young Russian diplomat that discovers that someone has tipped off the Americans about the A-bomb.

I chose to do a great deal of research to really get a feel for the story and its context. I wanted to avoid the usual Russian stereotypes and wanted to give the main character a great deal of character. I chose to make him a functioning schizophrenic, paranoid of the very government for whom he works for. When he's sane, he's fully functional and mindful of his job but when he lapses, he is in a paranoid state of mind, and at that time embraces the time Lenin was in power, wishing he were still alive so he could save Russia from its inevitable demise. In his office he had a lifesize safe put in, which acts as his panic room, and also has a false floor that reveals a ladder that leads to a tunnel that ends outside the building.