Wonderful article about the work of J. Todd Anderson, who storyboards the Coen Brothers’ movies:
Anderson’s drawings have a jauntiness that seems absent from the more serious cinematic depiction; Anderson says he is simply trying to inject as much of a sense of action as possible into each scene.
Anderson describes the process of meeting about a new film:
“It’s like they’re making a movie in front of me,” he says. “They tell me the shots. I do fast and loose drawings on a clipboard with a Sharpie pen—one to three drawings to a sheet of regular bond paper. I try to establish the scale, trap the angle, ID the character, get the action.”
More in the article…
Apropos of the recent film graphics post, Jessica Helfand at Design Observer writes about the recently released Iron Man:
Iron Man is the fulfillment of all the computer-integrated movies were ever meant to be, and by computer-integrated, I mean just that: beyond the technical wizardry of special effects, this is a film in which the computer is incorporated, like a cast member, into the development of the plot itself.
I’ve not seen the movie but the statement appears to be provocative enough to elicit cheers and venom from the scribes in the comments section. (This seems to be common at Design Observer, are designers really this angry and unhappy? How ’bout them antisocial personal attacks! I take back what I wrote in the last post about wanting to be a designer when I grow up. Some thick skin or self-fashioned military grade body armor over at DO.)
On the other hand, a more helpful post linked to the lovely closing title sequence, designed by Danny Yount of Prologue.
I wish they didn’t use Black Sabbath. Is that really the way it’s done in the film? Paranoid is a great album (even if Iron Man is my least favorite track) but the titles and the music couldn’t have less to do with each other. Enjoy the music or enjoy the video; just don’t do ‘em together.
As much as snickering about computers in movies might make me feel smart, I’ve since become fascinated by how software, and in particular information, is portrayed in film. There are many layers at work:
- Film is visual storytelling. As such, you have to be able to see everything that’s happening. Data is not visual, which is why you see symbols that represent data used more often: It’s 2012 but they’re still storing data on physical media because at some point, showing the data being moved is important. (Nevermind that it can be transmitted thousands of kilomteters in a fraction of a second.) This is less interesting, since it means a sort of dumbing-down of the technology, and presents odd contradictions. It can also make things ugly: progress bars are often full screen interface elements, or how many technology-heavy action flicks have included the pursuit of a computer disk? (On the other hand, the non-visual aspect can be a positive one: a friend finishing film school at NYU once pursued a nanotechnology thriller as his final film because “you can’t see it.” It would allow him to tackle a technical subject without needing the millions of dollars in props.)
- Things need to “feel” like a computer. When this piece appeared in the Hulk, they added extra gray interface elements in and around it so that it didn’t look too futuristic. Nevermind that it was a real, working piece of software for browsing the human genome. To the consternation of a friend who worked on Minority Report, on-screen “windows” in the interface all had borders around them. If you have a completely fluid interface with hands, motion, and accessing piles of video being output from three people in a tank, do we really need…title bars?
- It’s not just computers—anything remotely complicated is handled in this manner. Science may be worse off than software, though I don’t think scientists complain as loudly as the geeks did when they heard “This is UNIX, I know this!” (My personal favorite in that one was a scene where a video phone discussion was actually an actor talking to a QuickTime movie—you could see the progress bar moving left to right as the scene wore on.)
- There’s a lot of superfluous gimmickery that goes on too. There’s just no way you’re gonna show important information in a film without random numbers twitching or counting down. Everything is more important when we have know the current time with millisecond accuracy (that’s three digits after the decimal point for seconds). Or maybe some random software code (since that’s incomprehensible but seems significant). This is obvious and sometimes painful to watch, except in the case of a talented visual designer who makes it look compelling.
- Finally, the way that computers are represented in film has something to do with how we (society? lay people? them?) think that computers should work.
It’s that last one that is the fascinating point for me: by virtue of the intent to reach a large audience, a movie streamlines the way that information is handled and interfaces behave. A their best, it suggests where we need to go (at their worst, they blink “Access Denied”). It’s easy to point out the ridiculousness of the room full of people hunched over computers at CIA headquarters and the guy saying “give me all people with last name Jones in the Baltimore area” and in the next scene that’s tallied against satellite video (which of course can be enhanced ad infinitum). But think about how ridiculous those scenes looked twenty years ago, and the parts of that scenario that are no longer far-fetched as the population at large gets used to Google and having satellite imagery available for the price of typing a query. Even the most outrageous—the imagery enhancement—has had breakthroughs associated with it, some of which can be done by anyone using Photoshop, like the case of people trying to figure out if Bush was wearing a wire at the debates in 2004. (Contradicting their earlier denials, Bush’s people later admitted that he was wearing a bulletproof vest.)
That’s the end of today’s lecture on movie graphics, so I’ll leave you with a link to Mark Coleran, a visual designer who has produced many such sequences for film.
I recommend the large version of his demo reel, and I’ll be returning to this topic later with more designers. Drop me an email if you have favorite designer or film sequence.
Elegantly done, and some of the driest humor in film titles you might ever see, the opening sequence from Death at a Funeral.
Excellent (and appropriate) music, color, and type; does a great job of setting up the film. IMDB description:
Chaos ensues when a man tries to expose a dark secret regarding a recently deceased patriarch of a dysfunctional British family
Or the tagline:
From director Frank Oz comes the story of a family that puts the F U in funeral.
Halfway through The Fog of War by Errol Morris (of The Thin Blue Line, or the Apple “Switch” ad campaign depending on your persuasion), Robert S. McNamara (Secretary of Defense for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) describes proportionality in war:
Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if [General Curtis] LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay’s command.
The gruesome description is abetted by a different kind of proportionality—that when placed in the context of size with regard to U.S. cities, these numbers become more “real.” I found this set particularly striking for how ordinary the cities were—Cleveland and Chattanooga, in addition to the usual New York and Los Angeles. The huge metropolitan areas may be too abstract for many, but Cleveland!?—those are actual people!
The entire transcript is also on Errol Morris’ site—amazing. Why don’t more studios do this? It’s great to be able to study it more closely, and was enough to convince me to purchase (rather than just rent) the movie.
