Form: Development 1

The past week I have been continuing to develop the form of the camera. I'm still finding it a bit tricky to establish what it should look like but just continue to prototype what my mind is thinking.

Of the many prototypes I've been making this one is getting quite close to what I imagine the camera to look like. It's retro, it's small, it's boxy and most of all it resembles a camera.

Here is how I came to something that I am happy with.

I decided to scale the product down a lot compared to my other prototypes I've been making. I thought this would be important because the bigger it is, the more material required to make it and hence the heavier it will be.

With this first one I was trying to create a more produding feature to seperate the lens from the camera. It was also situated slightly more to the left as a hook is required in the centre. This is to hook the reel onto the camera, and due to the aerodynamics this will need to be central.

There wasn't much symmetry with this form and it wasn't working for the project. Therefore I decided to take the protruding curve right across the top of the shape and left the front flatter to enable a more sturdier platform to attach the camera lens. I added two protruding lines on either side to give the camera orientation. This would help the camera look right when it's attached to the balloon. The flat front edge wasn't working for me and with the camera lens still situated at one edge, it still took the symmetry away from the product.

A big part of the styling of this camera is symmetry. Due to the aerodynamics of the camera when it's in the air, it needs to be as stable as possible. Symmetry helps with this. Also, looking at vintage and retro cameras you can see that the focus point of the camera is directly in the middle, where the lens is situated.

So on my next model I took a curve across the top and bottom of the camera, left the lines of orientation, took away all straight angular edges and put in more finer details. This is the one I am happy with and am going to continue developing.