The Rules of Cool! A 365 Style Guide

The Vehicles, Guns, and Fashion Behind the Series...

This month’s behind-the-scenes article may seem a little slight at first, but what’s about to unfold here is a taste of the creative process here. 365 Infantry is a bit of an alchemy project, the synergizing of a unique look and feel via a melting pot of influences and aesthetics. Today, we’ll be discussing three of the big tentpoles behind the series’ identity: the rides, the guns, and the fashion.

This isn’t meant to hand out lifehacks for storytelling, it isn’t unearthing some great truth, it’s an exercise in what happens when a filmmaker gets to play God with a theoretically unlimited budget, one who abides a single law: Rule of Cool.

We try to keep the science plausible and the world adhered to its own interior logic, but at the end of the day, 365 Infantry is a pulp series devoted to entertaining readers with a far-out future where the good guys and the bad guys clash from behind the wheel of their badass cars and bikes, shoot their pew-pew laser guns, and have a whale of a time doing so.

Before we dive in, a note from the meta side of things:

There was one core tenant I could not break from, barring a few exceptions. I conceived 365 as having been written during the summer of 1985. Why 1985? Because it’s smack in the middle of the 1980s and the 20th century Cold War was still a few years away from ending. This decision was meant to set the parameters of the series’ retrofuturism and limit what could appear in-world.

Now, without further ado, a style guide to 365…