Twelve visions of post-apocalyptic Toronto
Twelve visions of post-apocalyptic Toronto
By Luc Rinaldi | November 4, 2014
By Luc Rinaldi | 11/04/2014
(Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett)
Toronto sci-fi mastermind Jim Munroe ’s new project, Haphead , is an eight-episode webseries set in a near-future Toronto, where a subculture of teenagers learn lethal skills by playing a new breed of highly immersive video game. To pay for post-production, Munroe and friends have set up a Kickstarter campaign where one of the rewards for donors is Fallen Toronto , a month-by-month calendar full of richly detailed illustrations of what Toronto might look like after an apocalyptic event. Taken as a whole, the images make for an unusual—and unusually unsettling—imaginative exercise. We aren’t used to seeing Yonge-Dundas Square, Roundhouse Park and CityPlace used as settings for floods, epidemics or other disasters. (In movies and TV shows, it’s usually American cities like New York and Washington D.C. that get the end-of-the-world treatment.) We asked artists Mathew Borrett , Sanford Kong and Terry Lau to share the stories behind the dozen dystopian visions they created and how they made the leap from today’s crumbling Gardiner to tomorrow’s toppled CN Tower. Click through the image gallery to read what they had to say.
297632 <strong>Winter</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“This image, a version of an illustration done for <em>Spacing</em> magazine's 10th-anniversary issue, is maybe 200 years in the future, give or a take a decade. The SkyDome—and I still call it the SkyDome—is repurposed as, I don’t know, some kind of greenhouse habitation. Some people have said it’s a pirate headquarters, and I’m cool with that, too. I wanted not to tell any one specific story. A very common response I get is, ‘It looks better than it does now.’”<em>—Mathew Borrett</em> (Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-01-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-01.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-01.jpg 1000 391 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-01/ fallen-toronto-01 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett)
297633 <strong>Villages Horizontal</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“This image is a spinoff of the original future Toronto image—the winter one. I had that big scene set up and was interested in elaborating on one little bit of it. So I just zoomed the camera in to the top-left corner of that image and then rendered it out. It was really done as a kind of experiment. I didn’t even necessarily think of it as being Toronto. There are no recognizable landmarks in it. As it relates to the original image, though, this area is basically CityPlace.”<em>—Mathew Borrett</em> (Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-02-e1415111312112-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-02.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-02.jpg 1000 521 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-02/ fallen-toronto-02 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett)
297634 <strong>Villages Vertical</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“To create this one, I used a system that’s essentially controlled randomness. In these clusters or villages, there are maybe 10 or 20 different units or pieces that I randomly spread in a certain area. It’s fun because I click some buttons and random stuff happens. Sometimes it works, and sometimes not.”<em>—Mathew Borrett</em> (Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-03-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-03.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-03.jpg 601 1000 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-03/ fallen-toronto-03 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett)
297635 <strong>Fallen CN Tower</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“I’m not really sure where the idea came from, but this was a specific assignment that <em>Spacing </em>magazine gave me. They wanted the CN Tower fallen over. I kind of cobbled together bits and pieces of different photographs. I was interested in it being scaled accurately, so I actually took a Google image of the area and a properly scaled model and chopped it up into pieces and tried to figure out where it would actually land.”<em>—Mathew Borrett</em> (Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-04-e1415111325905-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-04.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-04.jpg 1000 260 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-04/ fallen-toronto-04 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett)
297636 <strong>Queen and Spadina</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“This is old-school ink on paper, done back in the olden days. I did this one to accompany an article in <em>Spacing</em> about what the city might look like in 10 years if humans were to disappear. I guess that was about nine years ago. In retrospect, I’m not especially satisfied with the image, to be honest, because some people see it and don't necessarily read it as that. They just see more trees. It almost looks like a nice place.”<em>—Mathew Borrett</em> (Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-05-e1415111338504-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-05.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-05.jpg 1000 529 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-05/ fallen-toronto-05 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Mathew Borrett)
297637 <strong>Toronto Skyline</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“I was approached by Jim Munroe to do some concepts based on his 2012 film <em>Ghosts With Shit Jobs</em>, which had not been shot yet. He sent me a brief and basically told me that the whole western economy had been eclipsed by the east and that there was an invasion by these alien spiders that died and left silk and their remaining shells. So, he wanted some images that depicted Toronto in this post-war era, where some of the people here in the city would collect the silk. The images were mainly to convey scale and context for the backstory.”—<em>Sanford Kong</em> (Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-06-e1415111351744-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-06.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-06.jpg 1000 432 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-06/ fallen-toronto-06 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong)
297638 <strong>Yonge-Dundas</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“For quite some time, I’ve been collecting photographs of the city. From construction sites of new buildings going up, I shot pictures of places where people gather, mainly for reference for future illustrations. I started to go through my folders and looked for areas that were familiar places. Then I worked over the digital photos in Photoshop.”—<em>Sanford Kong</em> (Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-07-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-07.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-07.jpg 750 1000 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-07/ fallen-toronto-07 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong)
297641 <strong>Gardiner</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“This image was taken somewhere between Parliament and Yonge Streets under the Gardiner. I had shot it back in ’97 mainly to study how concrete decays. I kind of imagined that, at some point, it would fall apart and cars would just drift off the top. <em>Ghosts With Shit Jobs</em> was the perfect excuse to do this kind of rendering.”—<em>Sanford Kong</em> (Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-10-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-10.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-10.jpg 1000 750 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-10/ fallen-toronto-10 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong)
297639 <strong>CN Tower and SkyDome</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“I think any time you destroy an iconic landmark it creates an unease in people. I remember seeing <em>Independence Day</em> many years ago and thinking, ‘Wow, what a way to destroy America.’ It has a greater impact when it’s your home. So seeing the images in <em>Ghosts</em> makes me and other Torontonians visualize an overlay of future possibilities, especially if something like 9/11 happened and the city skyline changed.”—<em>Sanford Kong</em> (Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong) Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-08-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-08.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-08.jpg 1000 750 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-08/ fallen-toronto-08 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong)
297640 <strong>AGO</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“For many years, I've imagined abandoned strip malls retrofitted with temporary housing and medical centres. The AGO would be a meeting place for resourceful people in the community to share ideas on how to survive and exchange or barter supplies and goods.”—<em>Sanford Kong</em> (Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-09-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-09.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-09.jpg 1000 733 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-09/ fallen-toronto-09 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong)
297642 <strong>Scarborough</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“This image was used as a matte painting in the <em>Ghosts</em> series. The still was given to me as a plate. I was directed to place a Buddha in a hillside with a power plant somewhere beside it. I don’t remember the backstory for the juxtaposition, but it was key to give the location a different feeling and keep the story in the realm of imagination.”—<em>Sanford Kong</em> (Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-11-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-11.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-11.jpg 1000 750 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-11/ fallen-toronto-11 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Sanford Kong)
297643 <strong>Sign</strong><br /><br /><br />
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“This sign needed to describe the environment in <em>Ghosts With Shit Jobs</em>, where it’s essential to warn the public about these huge spiders crawling all around future Toronto. Jim gave me some copy and I had to make sure that the sign really fit into the current public signage. We referenced a lot of road construction signs so that there was a warning element to it. We just wanted to make it as realistic as possible.”—<em>Terry Lau</em> (Image: courtesy of Terry Lau) Fallen Toronto Fallen Toronto https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-12-200x200.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-12.jpg https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fallen-toronto-12.jpg 620 485 [] https://torontolife.com/culture/pin-calendar-shows-post-apocalyptic-toronto-look-like/slide/fallen-toronto-12/ fallen-toronto-12 0 0
(Image: courtesy of Terry Lau)
Oh I thought that was Toronto under the Ford’s administration. You say it is just pretend, it is not real. Right, he wasn’t elected mayor – so the nightmare is over? Great.
@michelhbup to I looked at the draft ov $6424, I have faith that my mother in law was like they say truly erning money part-time on their apple labtop.. there best friend started doing this for only about 20 months and just now repayed the depts on there home and bourt themselves a Mercedes. I went here,➨➨➨➨➨➨..http://GoogleProjects/Get/Position/now…
Do not destroy Toronto before my wife and I visit next fall. Unless it’s done for a new Fallout Game. Toronto would be great for that game.
On topic, the first image is really an attention grabber.
Toronto will be an eternal city.
that’s it?! -_-