Logo Series - Sea Base Alpha

In tribute to Paul Gerber’s austerely beautiful “The Sea”, this background depicts the final climatic frames of the film that served as the overture to The Living Seas pavilion. A film in which the last scene speculatively illustrates a futuristic underwater base with a proto-computer-generated model that builds to this image that dramatically transitions into the real “Hydrolators” that transport guests to Sea Base Alpha.
An updated logo of Sea Base Alpha hallmarks the lower portion of the background, which portrays one of the more deeply transcendent objectives of The Living ­­­Seas — interspecies understanding and cooperation.

Designer Notes:

This is actually the culmination of two separate projects. The first, a recreation of the original 1986 CG “wireframe” ending of “The Sea, and the second, a vectorization and (an E82 style) modernization of Sea Base Alpha’s official logo.

The “Wireframe” was reconstructed in vector format using several aligned frames from a low-res source demo of the film. In order to maintain blueprint-like accuracy (and my own sanity) the various elements (doors, railings, rockwork, etc.) were originally color-coded before receiving its final monochromatic treatment.

The SBA Logo was first painstaking vector-traced from a source prop originally used in the attraction, including the original 1986 color scheme. Then was re-colored and “dimensionalized” utilizing only gradients that (in most cases) contain color swatches from the original.            

Comments

[Justin Ponzi]

The scenes at the end of "The Sea" is one of those incredible moments that the Imagineer's do so well. That moment where we are transported to a different place and reality. That moment when the theater doors open and the Hyrdrolators, the same ones that were just in the film, are really there, made me awestruck. I get goosebumps every time I listen to the soundtrack of that film.