Check out these amazing images released this week at Comic-Con for the new Tron movie. This just elevated my excitement level to ludicrously excited. The movie is slated for a 2011 release and is directed by Joseph Kosinski, who is someone I seriously need to do a post about at some point because he has been very inspirational to me as a designer.
I recently watched a documentary about Stanley Kubrick called Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes which I found very inspiring. The documentary aired in the UK on Channel 4 last summer during a promotional “Kubrick Season”. The videos have been pulled down from YouTube and Google Video, but I was able to find them on MSN which, for the record, has to be the worst video experience on the web. Regardless, I was able to work my way through the 5 segments because the content was extremely fascinating.
The director, Jon Ronson, starts off by talking about how he didn’t want to do another retrospective documentary on the life of the legendary director. Instead he shares his discoveries about the man through the investigation of Kubrick’s “boxes”. At the beginning I thought the term “boxes” was a metaphor, but it turns out Kubrick was an insane collector, a pack-rat of great proportions. Granted the things he collected pertained to the research he did surrounding his films, but the man kept everything from those studies and cataloged it all with high precision. His estate home was once filled with these boxes before they were donated to a museum for archiving.
Ronson approaches these boxes with great curiosity as their contents have remained a secret for the majority of their existence. The task is overwhelming, but as he begins to unpack them he finds a wide range of information about Kubrick’s films and lifestyle. For example, there are thousands of photographs of streets, doorways, gates, buildings, etc that serve as reference for the films Kubrick made. There are letters from fans that Kubrick labeled and filed based on whether they were affirming or not and where the letters came from. There are notes to assistants that talk about all manners of film-related and personal requests from Kubrick. All of these speak of Kubrick’s obsession with attention to detail. Towards the end we find out that Kubrick had a local box company make a custom box for his collecting and we hear how the company made notes about how fussy this customer was about the details.
A lot of this sounds like a waste of time, effort, and frivolous and indeed there are remarks from some of Kubrick’s assistants where they talk about how he would sometimes stop and laugh about how much he was obsessing about these things. But in light of how admired and respected Kubrick is in the film world you can see how this extreme focus on the small things contributed to his success and this is where I found myself inspired.
Seeing the amount of research Kubrick poured into his projects reminded me that what separates an artist from a great artist is how well you know your subject. Fine artists who are experts at painting, drawing, or sculpting humans and animals have a strong understanding of anatomy which enables them to render their subjects with precision. In the same vein Kubrick immersed himself in research and hired a photographer to go around and shoot locations, rooms, objects, and people so that he had a vast pool of resources to pull from. In one particular instance for the movie “Eyes Wide Shut” Kubrick had his photographer shoot hundreds of bedside tables from actual residences because the items placed on those tables were so fantastically random that no art department could come up with those combinations on their own. I thought that was fantastic!
It’s ideas and details like this that inspire me not to rely on my memory alone, but instead to take the time to capture reality as best as I can through whichever means I have at my disposal. That could be taking photos of reference material, going to the library to look through books, talking to people better versed in the subject I’m exploring, etc. On a practical note I’ve started using LittleSnapper and Evernote more frequently to catalogue images and information I find online and I’ve found this to be a helpful step in the right direction.
Being a student of the world we live in is a methodology I can’t stress the importance of enough to all artists. In fact, I’m planning to write more articles about it in the future. In the meantime check out this documentary and let me know what you think. I’m sure there are a few Kubrick fans out there.
When people go see a movie in the theater, drop it in their DVD player after getting it in the mailbox, or “insert method here” I’m sure the majority do so mainly because they want to be entertained and caught up in the story. I’m the same way. I’m a sucker for a great story and can easily veg out and let the onslaught of special effects and explosions wash over me with minimal thought applied.
But as a designer I’m also cursed, in a good way, as with every movie I watch I’m actively doing design and artistic research, especially in regards to user interfaces. That’s a part of my brain I can’t switch off and is never more apparent than when I watch a spy thriller or sci-fi film which is when my research antennae goes into hyper-alert mode.
For example, you know those scenes during a Jason Bourne movie when the government is desperately trying to locate Bourne via satellite on a massive wall full of computer graphics cycling through their clues or when John Anderton searches through the translucent visions of the precogs to determine the next future murder? Those are the times when my mind is furiously snapping away mental images for safe keeping. In fact, I own both of those movies, as well as several others, largely due to scenes like these so that I can draw upon them for inspiration.
Speaking of Inspiration
The interface used by Tom Cruise in Minority Report is easily a favorite and cited often as an inspiration among designers. The multi-touch controls were mind-blowing at the time yet seemed plausible as a method of interacting with data in the not-to-distant future, which is the setting of the film.
When I see interfaces like these I often wonder who designed and developed them as well as how they were implemented into the scene. For the most part I believe they’re created by the visual effects teams working on the project. Today, however, I learned about a company who specializes in these kinds of visuals specifically for the film industry and were actually the ones behind the interface of Minority Report. That company is called OOOii.
Designers of the Live Environment
The single-most fascinating fact behind OOOii is that they build systems instead of just visuals. While they do spend time designing interface elements (often in Adobe Illustrator) and then animating them in products such as Adobe After Effects, OOOii also develops a programming framework that gives them precise control over these visuals and how they animate and interact with the actors. Some of their early work was built in Macromedia Director and developed for the movie Enemy of the State. Since then they’ve worked on films such as The Island, Fast and Furious, and Deja Vu and utilized Adobe Flash as the programming environment for these visuals.
Obviously a goal for OOOii is to give more credence to the scene so that the viewer is able to remain fixed within the story. At the same time these live visuals aid the actors and help them remain in character and visualize the environment they’re in.
To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before
OOOii just finished work on the new Star Trek film and you can see some of the visuals they created for the Bridge of the Enterprise in the above image. These visuals are a mix of Flash and After Effects elements, but the new approach is that they are being controlled via an Adobe AIR app built by OOOii. While on set the team from OOOii can remotely control all of the visuals and screens to the live action. That has to be incredibly helpful to the actors and director.
Lee Brimelow of Adobe interviews OOOii where you can find out more about their processes and see some of the various visuals they’ve produced. Visuals like these will continue to inspire me, but learning this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff is just another heavy dose to add to the mix.
The first trailer for Neill Blomkamp’s first feature film release District 9 has surfaced on Apple’s trailer site. The 3 images above are screengrabs from that trailer.
I would guess that most people have never heard of Neill. Neill’s background is in visual effects and has an amazing ability at blending CGI with live action elements. He used to work with The Embassy Visual Effects and built and directed this commercial for Citroen as well as several others that you can view on the agency’s website (I particularly like “Citroen Runner” and “Nike Evolution”).
My first introduction to Neill’s work was a short video he did called Tetra Vaal, which sparked other shorts based in South Africa (Neill’s home country) and contains a shaky, documentary style of narrative. Not only does the CGI he produces blend in perfectly with his live action shots, but the overall aesthetic that he creates is gritty and convincing. Most of his work has an indie feel to it and the lack of resources I feel really lends itself to the documentary style and overall realism of his films.
Based on his work filmmaker Peter Jackson has teamed up with Neill for a few years now on a few projects. One of those was slated to be a feature film based on Halo, the mega-popular video game franchise from Microsoft. The project stalled and I believe has been cancelled. District 9 is the first major collaboration between Jackson and Blomkamp and looks to expand on the universe that Blomkamp constructed in one of his shorts called Alive in Joburg. The main theme is that an alien race has taken up residence in South Africa and the film follows the struggle between the locals and these new inhabitants.
I’ll be interested to see how District 9 plays out. With the backing of a major Hollywood player such as Jackson, I would imagine that Blomkamp has a lot more resources at his disposal. Hopefully the indie style that Blomkamp has developed and is known for won’t be diluted due to an increased budget.
So that some random dude can plot out the events that took place in the movie Cloverfield. Classic.
Let me start off by apologizing to those of you out there whom I’m about to single-handedly steal time away from more important things you have to do. I’m sorry and you’re welcome. Thanks to Khoi Vinh, I’ve come across a new favorite site that is already bookmarked, subscribed to, and gained my affection in only a matter of minutes. Art of the Title is a site devoted to movie title sequences and features video clips, commentary and occasionally interviews. The catalogue of titles is impressive and will no doubt take some time to peruse. Enjoy!
