Back to the Future
Toy Edition

Outatime

If my calculations are correct, you will be reading this precisely after my very first time travel attempt.

Back to the Future has had a big impact on my childhood and I was always fascinated by Doc Brown’s little creation.

As kids, we have a vivid imagination and I wanted to design a car that my younger self would have enjoyed.

The miniature effect’s look and feel was inspired by tilt-shift photography. The goal was to make it feel like an architectural model, where time travel is realistically possible.

Simulations were done with a mix of different production pipleines with the most challenging one being the flames at a whopping raw simulation size of 200gb! (not 1.21tb)

I reconstructed the basic idea of the scene in real life and tried to record it, in the most natural way. The cinematography of how the shot was filmed was greatly informed by this and later rebuilt using a finicky Camera rig that's being driven with various noises to give it a more natural feel.

The sound of time

The most underappreciated aspect of time travel is its sound. I collaborated with my good friend Genc Rashiti and we used a wide range of generated as well as self-recorded sound effects.

Some are as simple as a sliding thumb over an iPhone’s microphone. Others are more sophisticated.

All these effects combined gave me a result that took me right back to my childhood. I hope you will too.

Thanks for your time.

Special thanks to Genc Rashiti for his support with SFX, Louis Manjarres for his continuous feedback, and my beloved sister Katrin for her help on the camera work.