LOCATIONS

Veiled Reality was always seen as a story that would be set in the near future and in Bradford, a place deeply connected with the personal and professional histories of the project team.

We envisaged a future Bradford, post-Brexit and a city that never bloomed after its City of Culture status in 2025, but has become a haven for a countercultural arts+tech spirit that survives and can work under the radar; ideal conditions for a charismatic young Muslim woman to work in near secrecy…

We felt that the iconography of the city's derelict mills and industrial heritage, blended with a dose of our science-fiction influences could make for an interesting aesthetic.

Some of our cinematic influences included…

Dr. Eden's abandoned factory in The Leftovers.
Iris Hineman's greenhouse in Minority Report and a similar Unreal Abandoned Glasshouse environment.

We also experimented with Midjourney to imagine concept images of abandoned stadia, warehouse, factories and mills as a kind of "favela-chic" aesthetic…

We also undertook a field trip to Salts Mill's Roofspace in Saltaire to understand whether capturing and adapting a real location could provide the setting for our story. Coincidentally, in 2014, this space housed a set of sculptures – Cloth + Memory – blending textiles, industrial heritage and memory.

We also considered whether the once futuristic, but now derelict Richard Dunn sports centre might make for an interesting location.

Ultimately, we settled on utilising a number of Unreal Abandoned Factory and Abandoned Warehouse environments to begin to build our setting.

Modular Abandoned Warehouse in Environments - UE MarketplaceModular abandoned warehouse environment for UE4.7 and UE5, featuring static meshes and blueprint assets for lighting and mesh placement.

Modular Abandoned Factory in Environments - UE MarketplaceA small set of modular assets useful for creating old and abandoned factory or warehouse environments.

The LINE

In developing Qainaat's backstory, we speculated that, in the mid-2030s, she had…

"…a journeyman education that bounced between formal (MIT Media Lab, SoDA), countercultural communities in the ruins of The Line and seasteading billionaire technologists."

Though not a core part of our intended prototyping work, we couldn't help but take a generative AI diversion to explore what this might look like visually,

Wd didn't spend too much time exploring this as we couldn't direct Midjourney to depict the sense of scale – or decline - we hoped to see, nor anything that was recognisably The Line. However, it led us to consider whether some flashback sequences might be interspersed through our main story.