The Making of F1 Infographics 2008

The Singapore F1 night race is finally over. Over the past few days, The New Paper has been publishing some infographics as coverage for the event. Here's a look at the making of one we've published. Putting together an F1 graphics with so much detail requires great team effort.



This is a huge collaboration effort of 4 artists, Chng Choon Hiong, Kelvin Chan and Fadzil Hamzah aka Fuzz. Chng did the caricature for Lewis Hamilton in the middle. Fuzz provided the 3D racetrack. I modeled and rendered the F1 car. The whole thing was then laid out by Kelvin.



It's not easy to come up with a fresh concept for F1. As you can see from my collection of F1 infographics, from newspagedesigner.com, most of the ideas have already been used before: racetrack, pit crew, moves, and car designs. Ours is a combination of pit crew, racetrack and the drivers' race suit.



This is the wireframe of the McLaren MP4-23. I spent about 2-3 weeks modeling it.





I've only the blueprint from the top, and even that's a photo of an illustration from the wall at the McLaren press conference. For side profile, I had to rely on photos sourced from Flickr.com. Much of the modeling is done by moving the vertices around in 3D with reference to photos. Eye modeling.

At the start of the project, I was actually modeling the Ferrari car. But it became increasingly difficult to do so because of the lack of reference photos. I just couldn't see the form and detail behind the wheels. It didn't help that I don't have the blueprints for the Ferrari 2008 car too.

Luckily, supervisor Hup just came back from a McLaren press conference with tons of close-up high resolution photos. Meanwhile, I received information that there's a McLaren displayed at Paragon shopping centre. And so I went down and took another ton of photos for the McLaren MP4-23.

After that, it's the 2-3 weeks of modeling. It was long because that was on top of other daily work.



Here's the render without the official sponsor logos on the car body. I have no idea why but it seems that we don't have copyright to display the official logos. That sounds pretty silly, I know.





Here you see Kelvin doing some research. We had some F1 magazines and guide books. They provided us with information on the pit crew and graphics on how the cars tackle turns and overtaking.





Kelvin had brought his toy model to pose as the pit crew. The model was was fitted with a generic orange uniform. 18 photos were taken, one for each crew.

After the photo shoot, the tedious process of laying out the whole infographics began. The whole project was concluded within an amazing 2 days, excluding the weeks that I spent modeling.

There are some more photos from the Making of F1 Infographics on my Flickr photos set, and the tons of McLaren reference photos.