The TFL journey plan poster for London anticipating the Tour of Britain visiting the capital
With the Grande Départ having long left Yorkshire, and before Le Tour started for real on the continent, the Tour de France’s peloton passed through humble London town – generally ballsing up the weekend traffic.
Ever the sage minds, Transport for London (TFL) anticipated this and produced some literature to remind the local chimney sweeps and the like, with the resulting poster showing the city skyline forming the sprockets of a bicycle.
The job was taken on by Asylum SFX, a company that has worked on some spectacular TV and movie special effects in its time, but also does some strange and interesting concept work, sometimes straying into the more everyday product design spectrum.
The vectors of the city skyline placed on the cogs, the model built in SolidWorks
The team at Asylum took reference images of key buildings throughout London and produced vector silhouettes. These in turn were then built into a 3D model in SolidWorks and arranged in a number of different ways until the client was happy with the look.
Instead of merely passing off a render to be photoshopped to Boris Johnson’s heart’s content, the individual cogs were physically made.
Water-jet cut and spun polished to give the final surface appearance, the cassette was assembled and photographed for the final images. Très bien!
The skyline sprockets were water-jet cut and polished, ready to be photographed
