The latest release of Play Store has introduced a more streamlined look-and-feel for the tab strip of our ViewPagers. If you don’t use it in your project, you should.

ViewPager comes with two implementations of the tab strip – PagerTitleStrip and PagerTabStrip. The first one is not really worth talking about. The second one is much nicer, allowing tapping the titles to switch to the relevant tab and exposing APIs to control a couple of visual aspects. We were using PagerTabStrip up until the latest iteration of the store app. That is, until our visual designers wanted a nicer appearance that is more inline with the general direction of where the platform tab indicator is heading.

On the visual side of things, we wanted to:

• Use different colors for full underline and the selected tab indicator.
• Use translucent vertical separators between the tabs.
• Have the left-of-the current tab “peek out” to indicate that there’s additional content available.
• More compact display of tabs – instead of having left/right title all the way at the edges (which looked particularly bad on wide tablets), display the title tabs as a “connected” chain.
• Nicer swiping feedback as the user swipes between tabs.

As it turns out, you can write your own tab strip control.

Step 1: make yourself familiar with the source code of the existing components. That always helps.
Step 2: throw some code around and see how it looks like on the screen. At some point, after enough Mountain Dew has been consumed, it starts looking somewhat decent. Rinse and repeat.

Let’s talk about the particular implementation details.

• Each tab title is a TextView. This provides nice accessibility support. Mark it as focusable and set a background drawable that has your app’s assets for pressed and focused state.
• If the content of your ViewPager is static, iterate over all page titles and create a TextView for each one. Set a click listener on each text to call ViewPager.setCurrentItem.
• Add a global layout listener and call scrollToChild with ViewPager.getCurrentItem. Don’t forget to remove that listener after you’re done with the initial scroll. The intent here is to respect the initial tab selection and scroll the selected tab into view.
• Implement ViewPager.OnPageChangeListener (somewhere outside your view pager / tab strip).
• In onPageScrollStateChanged remember the current scroll state.
• In onPageSelected if the current scroll state is SCROLL_STATE_IDLE, remember the selected index, set offset (more on this in the next points) to 0 and call invalidate on your tab strip.
• In onPageScrolled remember the selected index and the offset, call invalidate on your tab strip and also call scrollTo on the tab strip to scroll its contents based on the selected index and the offset.
• You want to keep the scroll state of the tab strip in sync with what the user is doing with the your view pager. If the user swipes right to go to the tab that is currently to the left, you want to start scrolling the title of that tab as well. How much? That depends on your design. Our target is to have some part of that title always peeking in. So you would need to compute the value of the first parameter of scrollTo based on the tab index, relative scroll offset and that extra peeking delta.
• Now about the pretty pixels. Designers love assets. You can create a whole bunch of assets for the individual tab – normal state, pressed state, focused state, pressed+focused state, let’s throw the selected state in, and what about the disabled state? That’s nice. But. Take a look at the second screenshot – the selected underline “slides” between the two tabs. That’s not something that you can do with assets set on each individual TextView behind these two tabs. I guess you can do an empty View, set those assets on it and start laying it out dynamically as you slide. Kind of gross.
• So instead, right now we’re painting the underlines in code. Canvas.drawRect is your friend. Just don’t create the Paint objects every single time in onDraw.
• First layer the thick colored selection underline. This is where you need the index of the selected tab and the relative scroll amount. During scroll, this underline “slides” from one tab to the next (left or right). So you use the scroll amount to interpolate the X coordinate of both the left and the right edge of that underline based on the X coordinates of the two tabs.
• Second layer is the thin transparent black underline that goes across the entire tab strip. Using transparency creates a nice layered effect across the bottom edge of the colored underline.
• Finally, since we’re already drawing lines in code, why not draw the vertical separators in code too? These can be done with drawables set on each title TextView, but you have the edge case of the first/last tab. Since we want separators between the tabs, but not on the outside, you’d need to create two sets of assets – one for the tabs that show that separator (say, along the right edge), and one for that special tab that doesn’t (in this case, the very last tab). If you use translucent black for these separators, you’ll get a nice blend with the press/focus highlight assets set on the tabs – provided that they are translucent too.
• You’ll need to provide a way to swipe the tabs themselves. Our current solution is to have the tab views live in a horizontal LinearLayout that lives inside a HorizontalScrollView.

So, to summarize. Track the scrolling. Draw translucent lines. Make your designers happy.  Oh, almost forgot. Don’t ignore edge cases. Such as, say, all the tabs fitting in on the screen – in which case you don’t need anything to “peek in” from the left edge.

Kirill: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your work so far.

Ash: My name’s Ash Thorp and I am a designer, an illustrator, art director, creative director. I do a lot of stuff for film, multimedia and video games. I’ve been freelancing from my home studio for almost a year now, and I’ve been in the film industry for about three years. I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid. I picked design in college and got two degrees, and after that I immersed myself into the furthering my education via the internet, which lead to me discovering my own voice.

Kirill: Was it your intended goal to get to work on movies?

Ash: I grew up on a really healthy dose of Saturday morning cartoons and anime and film, and I feel that film is a great medium of storytelling. It was always a big goal of mine to do something in film on way or another. It was always in the back of my head that I wanted to do it, and even though I didn’t know how I would do it, I figured out I’d make it happen.

I was working at a design firm down in San Diego doing graphics for action sports. It was fun, but I felt that I wanted to do something greater for myself, on a higher level, for more mass appeal if you will. I decided I wanted to design for film, and I had to figure out the niche I wanted to be in. I started following a few companies doing motion graphics. I suppose I was OK at design at the time – nowhere near where I am now, and there’s always place to grow anyways – and I saw that it was the niche for me. So I gave myself a time limit of three months to build a portfolio. Every time my wife and my daughter would go to bed around 11PM, I’d work until about 4AM on just building the portfolio, making a bunch of projects, which lead to creating the web site with much material.

I put this portfolio together, and I sent it out to around 50 studios. I got contacted back by only one of them directly, and it was Prologue, I was extremely surprised because they were my favorite company. I went there to interview, and they offered me the position of a junior designer. There was a little bit of negotiating, and a lot of talking with my wife. We live in San Diego and Prologue’s office is in Marina Del Rey up in LA. It’s about 2.5-hour drive, so I had to figure out a system to make it work, commuting every day for a whole year, building my skills and getting better at it. It was pretty crazy, commuting six to seven hours every day to work.

Prologue works on tons of films, and there was a lot of opportunity to grow. The artists and creatives there are just amazing, and it was really great to understand what it takes to do design at that level. It was like bootcamp. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life – the endurance of the whole year, not being able to see my family and friends that much, being completely exhausted and drained, working really hard. Prologue is a very intense environment, great for building yourself but really taxing, with extremely rigid timelines. You gotta do a lot of productions and a lot of work. It was good, and that’s how it all worked out. I left after a year, helped out a friend for about six months, and then started working on my own things from my home as a freelance artist for hire.

Kirill: Were you surprised during that first year, working on real-life productions across multiple departments?

Ash: I learned something new every day, a new surprise every day. You know, when you learn a magic trick, it takes the magic out of it, but it’s still really interesting. I feel that the deeper I go into film and understand it, the further I go from the original thing that I loved about it – which is the innocence of being a fan, now that I understand how the things are made.

Kirill: What were the specific productions you worked on at Prologue, and what was your role?

Ash: Some of the movie projects I worked on there were X-Men First class, Thor, then Walking Dead which became concept pitches to the director. Design houses like Prologue compete in this over saturated market where the client requests to see the design vision for a certain production – usually for free, which is pretty crazy. Those were my original concepts and ideas for things that I worked on with a group of people.  Each project would change or shift depending on the notes and feedback from the clients and things would move along from then on taking on a life of its own.

Kirill: Do you getting some kind of a script outline? What are you working off of at that stage?

Ash: Sometimes it’s nothing at all. Studios are obviously very secretive, because it’s important to protect their product. A lot of times you don’t get the script, and even when you do, you’d be so busy on 4-5 jobs that you don’t get a chance to read it, to understand what it’s about. Every project varies. When I worked on “Total Recall”, the first thing I got was the script and a lot of assets of different places in the film. I had a lot more direct contact. And on other productions I don’t always get these resources, so I’m kind of shooting in the dark, trying to figure it out as I get along.

They give us some information, but not all the way. Sometimes the creative director would tell me that this is the movie, and this is what they’re going for – kind of a rough breakdown. That person leads the job, and their responsibility is to manage the creative part, and the designers like myself pitch ideas to him and develop visuals to present to the director or the executive producers.

Kirill: Would you call yourself a conceptual artist in such a process?

Ash: Very much that. What’s interesting is that it breaks the barrier. There are these different titles, like a concept artist, a designer, illustrator. I draw a lot and I do a lot of design. I don’t really like to put barriers on anything creative, it’s very much creative concepting, really.  I suppose I consider myself just a creative person.

Kirill: So in the visuals you’re creating, you’re trying to define this visual world, this visual universe, and then some parts of it find their way into the movie depending on how much the director liked them.

Ash: Exactly. I’ll pitch a concept or an idea based on visuals and the initial treatment. I’ll work by myself, or with a team of talented people, and if the director likes it, he buys into it and they take the assets and the idea and send them to animation. The creative director on the job will make sure that everything is going along the way it needs to until the project is complete.

Kirill: Is that your usual scope of involvement?

Ash: A good example would be the title sequence for “X-Men”. My friend Simon Clowes, who is a creative director at Prologue, got a brief. He started building some of the assets for it, and I expressed interest in helping out on the concept. I went in there and started messing with his assets, building some of my own. Him, myself and one other designer Ji Yun Ha put together the concept, pitched to the director and he really liked it. Then we took all the assets and gave it to an animator.  They do a few more rounds of submissions to show how it lives as it moves, and then that animation makes it into the film. So there would be bits and pieces from all three of our designs in there. Simon was the creative director, and he had the final say, while I was helping out.

Sketch for human time capsule for “Prometheus”.

Render for human time capsule for “Prometheus”.

Kirill: On Iron Man, Thor or Spider-Man you have these characters with well-established visuals and universes around them. And then Prometheus and Total Recall have less of a visual anchoring around them. Do you see them as two different types of productions that affect your exploration process?

Ash: Prometheus was the extended story of Dan O’Bannon’s first idea of Alien. I tried to expand on the idea of that universe and the technology in it. They had a really wonderful brief, really strong key examples of what they wanted in it. It was really great to help on that, it was a fun project. I was hired freelance from my home office, and I was on it for five days, generating the work that you see. The crew of Prometheus liked it enough to take bits and pieces of my ideas and melt it with other design that where apart of the original pitch.

Total Recall is the reboot of the original Philip K. Dick’s story. It was completely rewritten and changed not to be very similar to the original. That project was ridiculously crazy to do. I was already freelancing and working from home, taking my own jobs, working on Ender’s Game. And a guy who I was working with suggested that a friend of his was looking for some help with graphic user interface for Total Recall. I got in contact with Patrick Tatopoulos who was the production designer, went to LA with my friend Ryan Cashman (lead animator on Total Recall) to meet with him, and it was really cool to see everything they were building, to read the script and see the assets. We had a good talk about what he needed, and I just said yes. It was a bit more work that I could handle, but if you want to do something, you do it.

It turned out to be around 200 shots, and just to give you the scale of things, it was just myself as designer and art director, and my friend Ryan who animated it. All those animations went out to other studios that out them into film. Usually there’s a big team that does that, so for me it was a huge accomplishment because I’ve never actually done user interface before. To never do it and then to work on a major film and do 200 shots of asset material is pretty crazy. I was juggling Total Recall and Ender’s Game full-time, working hundred-hour weeks. It was a cool experience, to see it done in the film. It just goes by so fast in the film, but there’s a lot of hard work and thought put into every shot.

Kirill: What kinds of assets did you get on Total Recall?

Ash: Every job is different, and every shot is different. Sometimes I get assets, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I get brief, and sometimes a get a written paragraph that says something about what needs to be done.

On Total Recall there was a lot of things that were done by the time I jumped in on the project. Patrick [Tatopoulos, production designer] would give me the briefs, and we’d go from there, developing design and concepts to put into the frame. We had cineSync sessions with Len Wiseman the director.

Kirill: It sounds a little bit unusual to have a significant part of the movie look to begin to take shape in post-production.

Ash: It’s very unusual. For example on Ender’s Game we have so much user interface and graphics, and I’ve been on it from the beginning – with my friend Ben Procter who is the production designer on the film. For Total Recall, coming in at the end it was weird and very hard. The way things worked in that world was already designed, and I had to bend everything to make it fit, to make it work within that film.

Kirill: So all the things like phones embedded in the palm of your hand, or every glass surface that can be used as a communication screen were already there, and you created the actual visuals around the filmed interactions with empty surfaces?

Ash: Exactly. They already have the actors touching the glass and interacting with it, without anything there obviously. So the concept was to take that idea and extrapolating it with the design that fits with the way the story was told.

Kirill: Was it a very limiting thing for you to work with?

Ash: Every project’s different. The thing is not to fight it, but rather develop yourself along with it. I tried to figure out clever ways to work around those limitations, to help the story along. That’s why I’m paid, that’s my job on these films. To help the director to tell a story. The graphics and the style have to fit the realm, the mythology of that world.

Kirill: Was there any specific guidance to make it look like an everyday thing, with nothing flashy, nothing jumping out at the “user” and demanding his attention, nothing holographic for the pure sake of holographic?

Ash: It was off and on. We had 200 shots in this film. It was the two of us, me and my friend Ryan, and each shot was very different. We tried to work out every little aspect and each little bit. We were challenged to figure out every shot, it came at different ranges. For example, the hand telephone thing had to feel complicated, interesting and intriguing, but also had to feel like a Skype conversation and to fit that world. Thankfully my first design for it was rock-solid and everybody liked it. I just had to remove a couple of elements, but for the most part that whole concept was greenlit pretty instantly, which is great because it took care of a lot of shots.

And there were things that had a lot of back and forth. For example, the body scanner had five rounds of design submissions, talking directly with Len Wiseman. That was cool – to be able to talk directly to the director, and not to the producer or somebody else. And being able to do it from my home through video chat was amazing. I was able to spend more time working instead of driving and meeting with him up in LA while he was editing. It was a cool progressive way of doing it, and it’s a sign of how things have changed. I’m just one guy in my home office working on a lot of shots for a huge motion picture, and I’m able to communicate directly with the director, and he’s able to draw on my stuff while we talk, and we throw ideas back and forth.

Kirill: Looking at the images for Total Recall you’ve put on your portfolio, you started with pencil sketches, and then transitioned to pure black-and-white diagrams of all these interfaces, long before going to full-color mocks. What’s the intent behind stripping away the color?

Ash: The original idea is in my head, and as I come from illustration background, I try to get the idea out as fast as I can from my mind, because there’s enough energy there to attract my mind to that idea. So I try to quickly connect my brain to my hand to the paper to get the idea out, and that’s why I show those sketches. They’re really horrible sketches, but I want to show that I don’t just sit down and make it on the computer. I sit there, I think about it and I draw it out, and then I take that sketch and I look at it, and I build it out in Illustrator or Photoshop. It’s to get the idea out as fast as possible, and if it looks good as a really crappy sketch, it’ll look much better when it’s refined and put in the computer.

And then not all the time, but I start with black-and-white. I have a problem with color in interfaces. It quickly goes bad if you add too much color. In my opinion it looks like a kids play set. This is my own preference, I like limited palettes is user interface. I build it black-and-white, or add a little color, and I bring it in Photoshop, and then I alter it to refine it, and then back to Illustrator, and back and forth until it feels right. It’s kind of like sculpting, trying to find that shape that works right.

Kirill: As you said it was all in post-production, and all those interfaces had to be grafted onto the empty surfaces that were already filmed. Did it happen that things that looked nice in the big Illustrator window didn’t work out well on smaller surfaces in the overall frame?

Ash: You have to pick your battles. There are so many things that I think are important, but others probably don’t. There were bits that I would like to have had changed, but there’s also things that look good. The body scanners turned out really nicely. I wasn’t excited about the color of it, as I was going for more teal-gray palette, instead of the green option they altered for the final print of the film. That’s why I make them all black-and-white, as I was not super excited about the color choices in the final output. But you know, they change it and that’s it. It’s all fictitious make-believe stuff, it’s about people telling their story. Usually it doesn’t really have to reflect on reality [laughs].

Kirill: What about creating a consistent universe within a specific film?

Ash: A good example of a movie where they did a lot of great pre-conceptualization and thinking was “Minority Report”. And the reason why that movie’s so strong was that they had a really good foresight to hire a bunch of futurists and technology developers, bringing them into a room for a weekend, and discussing the practicality of how things would possibly work. In that realm they spent more time and effort and money at the beginning stages of the development of the technology, which made that film so pronounced. It felt like it was a technology that was just ahead of us, that we could understand it. And on Total Recall it was more about the design and helping the story, and less about progressing the technology. I didn’t have the chance to sit there and develop the technology. Ender’s Game is a little bit different, where I have a little bit more say in the concepts, the idea of what the technology is and what it means and why these worlds exist. Every project’s different. The  idea of Total Recall of what the future might be is interesting, but may be not super accurate.

Kirill: What are your thoughts on stereo productions, or the recent wave of 3D re-releases?

Ash: My first take on 3D is that I don’t actually like it at all. I find it more of a nuisance as a viewer than anything else. I went to watch Jurassic Park pretty recently and I felt they did a good job with that. But I felt that that movie is just a fun movie to do 3D with. And I thought they did a good job with Avatar, but I’d rather just sit down and watch a David Fincher film and not have it in 3D, just have it look beautiful. I feel like it gets in the way of what you’re trying to do, and it’s more of a cheap trick to me. It’s not doing what I think it should be doing.

Kirill: Do you see holographic projection or some kind of 3D interaction in everyday computing a few decades into the future?

Ash: There already are things. I don’t think it’s going to be as eye candy as Tron where it’s beautiful glowing lights and particles. If you think about it, there’s already a lot of stuff  that’s happening, but you don’t necessarily see it. Companies like Leap that gesture program, and Alpha which has the setup where you can reach into your screen and work with that. I’m not sure if I believe in the idea that holograms are going to be the answer, or even be viable for interactions. Possibly. I could be wrong. The projection system in Minority Report was pretty cool.

I’m not sure if I’d care for holograms in my own life. I don’t know if it’s necessary. It depends on the situation and the scenario. The idea of living within your technology is a really beautiful thought. If it’s done right, it can really powerful. It’s so unique to each situation in my view.

Kirill: Do you see anything in the technology world right now, even in the exploratory stage, that you would want to see available?

Ash: That example that I was talking about, very much in the early stages right now, of being able to put your hands behind your computer screen and have your computer recognize your gestures, allowing to manipulate things on the go – that’s great. I’d like to see technology not just do things for entertainment, but to do things to help out, help the world, be a little bit better, a little bit faster. I have a couple of ideas for pretty crazy applications. There’s a lot of things, for example the Leap concept was pretty cool. I like the idea of things that are hardware destroyers. The things where you don’t need the keyboard anymore, and I don’t need Cintiq anymore, and I can have something around me that can record my gestures and data. It’s where I can draw on paper and it’s recording my movements, and it’s able to make that into data so that I can go back to my computer and manipulate it. Wacom and other companies are doing that.

We have virtual reality rigs. It would be cool not to have the computer display, but rather put on something that isn’t super cumbersome, something that you put on your head and work in that realm, even laying down and building things. It’s not about holding an iPad, but rather about immersing yourself more.

Kirill: How realistic is it to expect heavier applications – such as Photoshop or Illustrator that you’ve already mentioned – being slimmed down into environments that don’t have the current crop of hardware peripherals?

Ash: Can you imagine how far we’ve come now, and it still feels rudimentary. The idea of erasing the keyboard, if you look at the hardware design of Leap, it basically records your finger motions, which is very finite. The idea I have is that if you know where your fingers need to be for typing, you use any surface and it’ll know where your hands are, and it’ll understand which key you’re trying to hit. You can also do that with voice recognition, but the idea that I thought would be interesting was that you could pretty much erase the keyboard. Remember when we’ve first had cellphones, and they had a lot of keys on them, and text messaging was through numbers, and it was crappy to do. But now with the iPhone people would complain at the beginning because there were no keys, but once you get used to it, it’s like anything else. Like riding a bike and eventually getting good at it.

What I like about hardware destroyers is that it allows people not to waste products. Think about how much plastic and metal is wasted to make keyboards for everybody so that they can use their computers, and imagine not having a display, and not having a keyboard, and having an office that is just your books, your papers, and your computer which is kind of in the cloud, and all you have is this headset and your gestures. You sit back and relax, and I think it’s fantastic – this idea of creating things at that level is interesting.

Like everything in technology, there’s upside and downside obviously. But I feel that the upside for me – and I’m a bit optimistic about the future – far outweighs the negative. Those kinds of things excite me because I can see it already happening, and it’s just a matter of waiting for a kind of Christmas.

Kirill: Would you be interested in working on a production that would give you a way to introduce these interactions as part of that movie’s realm?

Ash: Totally. I’ve been lucky enough to be contacted by Apple to co-develop their OS, but I’m a little bit more focused on working on movies, so I didn’t end up working on that project. I like to live in a fantasy world where I make stuff up as I go, and the idea of the labor of making something happen isn’t necessarily my love. I probably wouldn’t find myself as a design development guy, that probably wouldn’t be a role that I would focus on. I do appreciate it, and I think it’s really cool.

Kirill: So you don’t necessarily need to create a full end-to-end story, but rather bits and pieces of it as required by the particular productions.

Ash: It allows me to just dream, and work completely freely. The idea of bringing this stuff to life and testing – that’s such a headache. I love technology, I love the future, I love the romantic side of it, but the idea of developing a final product for customers is not necessarily a dream of mine. If Apple were to hire me, it would be more for my design sense and ideas, I suppose. But the idea of working on something that takes five year to develop and make and put to public is a very challenging thing to take on. But I love it all, and I just enjoy it. The whole process can be a little grueling at times, but it’s enjoyable.

Kirill: Going back to Total Recall, how did you approach creating the visuals that are running on the “inside” of Synth robots’ helmets? The very idea of having such visuals runs a little against how image scanning and recognition would be performed by a machine.

Ash: I had a bunch of different ideas on how they would see things. I didn’t want to do the Terminator thing, although I loved that. We didn’t have a lot of time, and I had a couple of ideas where I wanted it to be more digitized, to pick up things like a lidar scanner – not seeing things but data. We tried to develop that, but we just didn’t have enough time and money. So we had to go back to the original concept of optical sensors that act as our own eyes, a camera with aperture exposure, opening and closing. It was me thinking weird ideas, pushing the envelope with something different. That was one of the things where I really wished I had more time. There were a lot of such things, as I didn’t have much time on the project itself. I wish I had a lot more time to develop, but I think it is OK as far as the design goes. The point-of-view was to emulate the idea of what our own genetic development in our eyes perceives light.

Kirill: What was your involvement with Iron Man III?

Ash: That was all concept stuff, and nothing made it into the final film. It was stuff that I made for pitching the title sequence. I had fun doing it, and I’m proud of it. I do projects that don’t go into the portfolio until the movie releases. By the time I’m able to show it, it might be a year old which is a total bummer. That’s just the nature of it. By the time the film is released I’ve already outgrown it as an artist, as a creative person. I usually do the work and hate it a week after [laughs], so a year after I usually don’t like it. But I do show it, because it’s my way of expressing what I’ve done, and I’m able to continually get work out of those experiences. I’m pretty hard on myself as a creative person, I just always want the best work for myself and for the client I work for. Each project is like a relationship, and each relationship is completely different. It’s just a different experience.

Kirill: Where are you going?

Ash: All this stuff is projects where I’ve worked for other people. My real goal right now is to develop stories and concepts and movies of my own creation with some friends of mine. Anthony Scott Burns and I are developing a bunch of ideas, and that’s where everything is going. I do think it’s cool that I can work on people’s projects and get hired by the studios, but at the end of the day it’s their stories, and I’d like more control over that aspect. This is why I’m trying to push for that next level of growth.

Kirill: But it’s not at a point where software tools allow smaller teams to create big-scale visuals?

Ash: I disagree. It’s already there. Anthony just finished this short film that we’ve been working on and I wish I could show it to you. It all comes down to how hard you want to work, and your understanding of what you’re doing. I’ve had Anthony on my podcast for many reasons. He’s incredibly talented, part of a new wave of talent that is able to use all these tools that are readily available to make stuff at the level of Hollywood really. I might be eating my words, but I think it’s already here. Things are changing constantly, and they’re even going to start changing even more as they progress. More people getting access to the tools, more people understanding the tools, more people being able to tell their own stories.

Kirill: But the cost of mainstream sci-fi productions is not really coming down, as the directors are pushing for more complex visual effects.

Ash: I have a lot to say about that. Alien cost $11M to make, Blade Runner cost $28M, and both are staple films for inspiration and benchmark. And films nowadays cost $170-$200M that don’t necessarily do as good of a job. There are so many factors about that, but when you have an actor like Robert Downey Jr. that charges $30M to be there, that’s a ridiculous part of your budget. It’s crazy to think about. It varies per project obviously, and it varies per team how talented and creative and crafty they are. It breaks down to the choices they make. If the director wants an actor that costs $30M, well then the movie jumps from, say $70M to $100M just because of that one choice. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but at the same time they know that big-name actors like Brad Pitt draw a crowd. It’s just a matter of choices I think, what the director and the producers decide on.

Kirill: So you’re saying that it’s getting simpler and more reasonable for small teams to make a big impact?

Ash: Absolutely. There’s a lot of people creating their own short films, going to Sundance or independent festivals. If you look at District 9 that was reported to cost $30M. To me it looks better than most of any other sci-fi in that range and time. I enjoyed it as a filmgoer. It’s just a matter of choices. Neill Blomkamp [director/screenwriter] had the help of Peter Jackson who was really connected with Weta, so they were able to utilize it as an amazing creative tool to develop things. I really think that it all breaks down to choices. A director can be smart about that executive producer that he puts in charge, and the producers are either smart about what they do, or they’re not. There’s a lot of variables that play into it. I firmly believe in the idea that movies that are done right nowadays can cost fraction of the price. At the end of the day, all the money aside, I don’t care about all of that. I care about telling the stories that resonate. That’s all it is, that’s all we’re doing. We’re not trying to just impress one another, and that’s what it comes down to, trying to impress or making cool-looking worlds – which is cool, but only lasts for so long. Story is king.

Kirill: What about the distribution then? How do you tackle the cost of getting a movie into the big chains, which can adds tens of millions of dollars to your cost. Is the solution to go to direct web-based downloads, to a more direct connection to the audience?

Ash: People like to go to the movie theaters and be entertained, but the platform is constantly changing. There are different ideas, with social media, or Kickstarter going directly to the fans. I think it’s beautiful. But I do enjoy going to see a movie in the theater. Some part of me thinks that this distribution makes sense, but at the same time I don’t feel that I agree with it. I would love to make a film based on the love and money of direct fan, get that to them directly, and then also give them production gifts, like “The Art Of” books. That sounds like wishful thinking, but if you do it right and you’re smart about it, it’s definitely a possibility. You’re just trying to connect the people who’re interested in what you’re doing with yourself. And if you can do it in a clever and smart way, that’s definitely possible.  Your only limitations with this stuff is yourself and the team you choose to surround yourself with.

Kirill: That can kind of connect to that headset you were talking about earlier, where it brings the widescreen directly to your eyes.

Ash: You can be just laying in your bed in relaxing, and you get that full experience. But it’s not the same. I just went to watch a movie in IMAX, and it was so beautiful in such a large format. But it’s constantly changing. Things are going to be moving around and shifting. It’s oversaturated, the world is getting overpopulated. There’s a lot of people trying to tell stories, people are trying to make a buck by making better products. It’s very competitive. It’s a natural turn of events.

Kirill: But for now it takes a lot of money to make a lot of money. Throwing a couple of random numbers around, if it takes you $5M to make a movie, you still need to get it into the current distribution pipeline, you still need to get it to the audience to not only to tell your story, but also to make that money back at least.

Ash: Totally, The way that they do it, the channels they’re using. The movie Moon is a good example. I think it took $14M to make it, and I believe it made its money back at the box office even with the distribution costs. But it wasn’t a huge film, it wasn’t distributed everywhere. It was a smaller film. And then a movie like Prometheus costed $120-130M to make, and it made $400M at the box office reportedly. And I believe it was all due to the marketing. It was phenomenal, it was so well put together. There were so many people that wanted to see Alien again. That’s a crazy thought to think that it cost $120M and it made $400M just at the box office, before DVD and BluRay.

In this world you have to put in what you want to get. You have to give to receive. If you want to make a lot of money, you have to spend a lot of money, and that’s the scary part. With movies it’s so uncertain about how it’s going to come back, and how you do it, because there are so many factors and moving parts. It all works out, in the end win or loose.

Thank you for having me on and taking time out of your day to talk with me about the things that I love.  Also a BIG thank you to anyone who actually read this and got to the end.

And here I’d like to thank Ash Thorp for taking the time out of his busy schedule to do the interview. You can find Ash online at his portfolio and his blog. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Kirill: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in the field.

Natalie: I am a self-taught, freelance illustrator born and based in Yorkshire, England. Although I’ve always enjoyed drawing, I kind of fell into illustration a few years ago after winning a couple of t-shirt design competitions and through people taking notice of my personal work on Web sites such as DeviantART and Dribbble.

Kirill: Is it important to evolve your stylistic choices? Is there ever a thought of exploring radically different directions? Is there a concern of falling into a certain rigidity of style?

Natalie: I’m not sure if it’s about evolving my stylistic choices per se, but I do think it’s important to experiment and try out new ways of approaching an illustration in order to progress. In fact, it’s more a case of “what can I do to make my work better”? For me it doesn’t even have to be anything too drastic either; it could be something as simple as using a different brush in Photoshop, for example.

As for style, I think it’s ultimately just an amalgamation of what interests you at a given time. As you go through life these interests naturally change and evolve and with it so does your style.

Kirill: From pencil sketches, to the initial transfer to the digital mode, to circling on finer details – what’s your favorite phase?

Natalie: It really depends on the project but generally speaking sketching is my favourite, as that’s the most creative phase of the process and the part where you still have the freedom to do anything. Then it would probably be adding the finer details.

The most tedious part of my process, due to how I work and produce my illustrations, would be laying out the paths and the base colours for my piece.

Kirill: When you transfer your pencil sketches to the digital world, do you try to preserve some amount of hand-drawn imperfection? Is this important to you?

Natalie: I actually do a lot of sketching straight in to Photoshop these days, but when I do use my sketchbook it’s nearly always to put down and explore ideas, crank out thumbnails and try out different compositions and layouts. So my pencil sketches are really just a foundation to build upon rather than a piece of the finished illustration. Sometimes I will do individual bits of the illustration and then piece them together once I’m on my computer.

That being said, I have been trying to incorporate more of a “roughness” to my work, which I think adds a little more character. For this reason I also tend to create a lot of textures, which I use in my work, from traditional sources such as different types of paper and scanning in brush marks.

Above all though, it really depends on what is needed and what will best help communicate the message of the illustration.

Kirill: What do you like about character design and why?

Natalie: I’m not sure exactly what it is, but the first thing I really remember properly sitting down and drawing lots of were the characters from The Simpsons – so I think it’s just something I’ve always been interested in.

Kirill: What’s different about designing t-shirts? Which parts translate well to the wearable medium, and which do not?

Natalie: The biggest thing you have to remember is that a design someone may hang on their wall isn’t necessarily what they would want to wear! But the way I approach designing a t-shirt is largely similar to how I would tackle other illustrative work; composition, colour etc are just as important.

However, there are certain things I do take into consideration when specifically creating a design for t-shirts. For example, where the design is placed on the t-shirt is important – either to give the design more impact or to avoid it from being unflattering. From my own experience, I also tend to find that simpler designs tend to do better (though this may not be the case for others).

Kirill: Do you think that advances in software tools and global connectivity are making it simpler to start in your field, and at the same time creating more competition and diversity for the clients to choose from? Does it make harder to stand out?

Natalie: Not so much advances in software, as I believe it will only take you so far, but definitely having access to sites like Dribbble, which broadcast your work on a global scale, has made it easier for me to get started in the field. At the same time I do think it creates more competition, but I believe that if you have the passion to progress and the talent then you will always, in the end, stand out.

As a side note on this subject, because I’m self-taught the ease at which you can now have access to other artist’s work and be able to communicate with them and learn from them has been a huge boon for me.

Kirill: How valuable is self-initiated work for you?

Natalie: Extremely! First of all, it’s a time when you can really play around and experiment with your illustrations. It also creates a consistent output and allows you to refine your process and become more efficient at what you do.

Kirill: What’s the best thing about being an illustrator?

Natalie: The variety of the work and having a great excuse to watch cartoons (it’s for research purposes, obviously).

And here I’d like to thank Natalie Smith for answering a few questions I had about her art and craft. You can find Natalie online at her portfolio and buy selected prints in her shop. She can also be found at Dribbble, DeviantART, Tumblr and Twitter.

Some blocks are more important than others. For example, the item cover and (in this case) the movie trailer are very visual, and we want to put them above the fold. There’s the item name, and some additional secondary info (such as movie genre, ratings, release date or running time) that “deserve” to be above the fold. There’s a certain logical hierarchy to that information that needs to be consistently exposed on the screen no matter what the device configuration is – some blocks “belong” together, no matter if it’s a single-column or a double-column layout.

And then there are action buttons. The buttons that keep us in business. We want them to be immediately identifiable, and – as much as we can – always there no matter how far you scroll the content.

Our previous solution for the buttons was twofold. Visually, the buttons are using a light blue color that sets them apart from all the other elements on the screen (apart from the rather awkward rating stars). Then, as you scroll the left column, we have the scroll-to-snap thingie where the buttons actually snap to the top edge of the viewport and stay there as you keep on scrolling that column.

As we started working on redesigning the main streams, it became quite clear that we need to redesign the details pages as well. Removing the heavy dark grey boxes and pinstripe textures was kind of a given, but that left us with the question of how to create a lighter, flatter look while still maintaining the same logical hierarchy of content. What you see in the latest Play Store release is the first lightweight iteration of where we’re heading.

The summary section has been redesigned to be more consistent across all device configurations. The title is more prominent, and the action buttons have moved to the right edge of the screen. The global rating stars and count have moved into what we call the byline section, going back to a consistent layout across the devices as well. And now, the space vacated by the action buttons and the stars in the left column can be given back to display larger, more visceral cover art. This is particularly relevant for “traditional” media that encodes additional information in the cover art – information that is lost if you start downscaling it by too much.

Going beyond the summary section, we’ve “lost” quite a few visual elements that helped separating the sections. No more colored headers, no more fancy textured footers. We’re going for a simpler, flatter look that uses typography and thin separators. Losing all this color has a nice side effect of making the action buttons maintain their visual importance. We removed the blue color that helped them stand out. But not having too many elements that use the same main color makes them stand out in the new design.

Finally, one of my favorite pieces is how the new design keeps the nice alignment of content above the fold. If you trace the bottom edge of the dark gray box in the left column and the bottom edge of the trailer in the right column, you’ll see that they align perfectly. This helps delineating the blocks that we consider to have more logical importance. The same delineation is maintained in the new design as well. Note how we’re able to move more information into the “main” section while still displaying larger cover art. Also, note how the visual alignment works across the bottom edge of the trailer and the bottom edge of the white area in the left column – not its drop shadow.

The EdgeEffect class provides a standard way to draw overscroll effects at the edges of scrollable containers. The EdgeEffectCompat class from the support library wraps it so that it can be used across multiple platform versions in a backwards compatible way. I’ve had my eye on this particular class for a while, and I finally got a chance to use it when we were working on improving the accessibility support for the video/screenshot gallery section on app details pages.

For a number of design requirements we have implemented our own custom scrolling component for the section that displays the application screenshots and the optional video trailer. The downside of doing custom scrolling handling is that you have to take over pretty much everything, including accessibility. This has been the last major piece that was lacking proper support in that area, and the latest Play Store release has finally closed that gap. And while we were in that section, I also fixed the missing overscroll indication.

• You get proper overscroll effects for “free” when you’re using the core views, such as ScrollView or ViewPager. And if you’re doing a custom scrolling implementation, EdgeEffectCompat is your friend. Here’s what you need to do in order to do it properly:
• For every edge that should show overscroll, define its own EdgeEffectCompat object.
• Call setWillNotDraw(false) on your container.
• For MotionEffect.ACTION_MOVE, call EdgeEffectCompat.onPull() when you detect overscroll at the matching edge.  If that method returns true on at least one object, call invalidate() on your container.
• For MotionEffect.ACTION_UP and MotionEffect.ACTION_CANCEL, call EdgeEffectCompat.onRelease(). If that method returns true on at least one object, call invalidate() on your container.
• Override draw() method, and after calling super.draw() go over all EdgeEffectCompat objects. For each one that returns false from its isFinished(), apply the matching chain of transformations (rotate, translate), call EdgeEffectCompat.setSize() and EdgeEffectCompat.draw(). If at least one draw() method returns true, call invalidate() on your container as the last line of your draw() method.

There’s the usual hand-waving involved here, and the source of ViewPager provides a complete example of doing custom overscroll draws. The two more complicated points are about updating the objects only during dragging, and about applying the correct sequence of transformations depending on which edge you’re drawing.

Kirill: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in the field.

Owen: I’ve been working as a Freelance Illustrator for about 4 years, since graduating from University College Falmouth with a First Class BA(Hons) in Illustration. My first professional commission was for the Guardian Weekend, a week before I graduated. An ex student of Falmouth was an art director for them and liked my work, so thought he’d give me a chance. Since then, it’s just snowballed really. I’ve now worked with a range of clients across the globe including Orange, Microsoft, Persil, New York Times, Templar Publishing, Walker Books, Creative Review, Jamie Oliver & Threadless.

Kirill: Your style is rooted in the mid-century period. What attracts you there, and what are your thoughts on bringing that almost analogue look back to life with the modern digital tools at your disposal?

Owen: I discovered a while ago, that my work thrives under constraints. Limiting colour palettes or applying strict compositions just seems to make my work better. That’s what I love about mid-century design. The creativity and strength of design many illustrators managed to accomplish, within the limitations of technology, just inspires me. It is certainly my golden age for design.

In terms of the analogue and digital, that’s something I struggle with constantly in my work. I love the imperfections of image-making, and the evidence of human touch, and yet I also love clean, slick and precise imagery too. I always start with drawing, work digitally, and end with textures and manufactured imperfections; that way I sort of try and get the best of both worlds. I think I’ll just always be sitting on the fence though really.

Left – illustration for “The Feed” project for Orange. Right – illustration for an article about eReader devices.

Kirill: Do you want people to recognize your work the first time they see your new illustrations? Is there a concern of falling into a certain rigidity of style?

Owen: I’d like illustrators and designers to recognize my work, yeah. I discovered a long time ago, that the general public just doesn’t have the eye for it. Family & friends always tell me when they see something they think is mine, when it looks nothing alike. I don’t mind though; it’s my job to know the difference. I never fear falling into a rigidity of style, because I’m never 100 per cent happy with any of the work I do. I’m constantly evolving my work in an attempt to improve and hone. If you look through my blog for example, there’s quite a distinct change from the beginning to the most recent. I live in a world of illustrative evolution.

Kirill: What do you think about making illustrations for web sites? How does the evolution of responsive web design and scaling the design with device size affects that?

Owen: It doesn’t bother me at all really. It’s lovely to see work in the physical world, but I love computers. They are incredibly enabling objects. I’d have sucked at living in any other era. I just love the internet too much. And the joy of work existing in the digital ether, is that you can be 100 per cent sure how the colours are going to look on your screen. Reproduction can be a nightmare!

Just to clarify though, I’m a great lover of objects of art. My bookshelf is my pride & joy. But what everybody has to understand, is that we are now living in an age, when you should only print something if it’s worth it. You either make beautifully crafted objects, or you just do it digitally. The age of the crappy plastic CD has died out but stunning Gatefold Vinyl lives on. eBooks pick up the trashy novel, while art books are printed with spot colour matt stock perfection.

Various branding materials for the Alone Aboard the Ark project.

Kirill: What does it take to create a complete branding for a new music album (“Alone Aboard the Ark”), from album sleeves to booklets to t-shirts to beer labels, all the while maintaining a unified theme across the different physical characteristics? How long did that process take, and what was the most unexpected thing that happened there?

Owen: Well the surprising thing with it, was how long it trailed on for. I completed the cover artwork before Christmas, and I’m still doing little bits and pieces for it here and there. I approached the merchandising etc. in a very self referential way really. I tried to reuse elements as much as I could, simplifying and rearranging, colour picking, dragging and dropping etc etc. It was great fun to do. Each design takes on a slightly new life, and you really get to explore an image and a theme. I hope to do it more.

Kirill: You also did the jacket design for “Wild Boy” novel. How is that field adapting to the world of digital book stores, and what effect are those scaled-down interfaces having on the process of designing book covers?

Owen: Um. I don’t really know. I don’t see much difference in designing for the digital and physical to be honest. They’re both viewed in similar ways. If it’s eye catching online, it should be eye-catching in store.

Kirill: And if we’re talking about books, you are working on your third picture book, “Laika the Astronaut” – due out later this year. How’s the world of physical publishing treating you? Which parts of the long process of publishing a book work well for you, and which parts are still rooted in the pre-digital world?

Owen: Nope. Not working on it. It’s been done for several months. Just takes ages for it to be released. Um.

Well I love picture books. The longer printing side etc. is slightly infuriating, but the creation of them is great fun. I’m used to working to tight deadlines and single images most of the time, so to be able to approach a 32 page picture book over the space of a few months is really refreshing. You get to develop ideas in such exciting ways. You can add extra concepts or fun elements, properly explore pace and flow, hone storytelling, and refine composition. Love it. And Templar are particularly good at letting me choose papers and fonts etc, so that the finished object is one I can be really proud of. I can’t wait to see Laika in the flesh!

One of the illustrations for Laika the Astronaut picture book.

Kirill: Going back to the client work, do you prefer getting a full artistic freedom for a project, or a more defined direction from the client?

Owen: It depends really. The main issues stem from a client not being sure about which they want. If they tell you you have artistic freedom and then essentially steer you to where they originally wanted you, that’s pretty annoying. But in general I’m game for both. I do like to have some input in the conceptual process, even if they give me a strong theme or specific subject matter. I don’t really love being a human paintbrush (but then sometimes that’s where the best money is)

Kirill: Does it ever happen that a client contacts you based on your existing work, but then starts pushing you into a direction you’re not comfortable with?

Owen: Not exactly. I quite like exploring outside my comfort zone, so its fun when they get me to do stuff slightly different. I’ve had clients with just simple bad taste, asking me to add horrific colours or making bad edits to images after I’ve created them etc. That’s annoying, but I dunno. I’m fairly easy going with it all. If I was too precious with my work, I’d have been a Fine Artist, or gallery illustrator. When people commission me, they have to get what they want; otherwise I’m failing at my job.

Animation still from the Wisdomap Schools project.

Kirill: How valuable is self-initiated work for you?

Owen: It’s not valuable per se. It’s just fun. There’s a massive back catalogue of work I want to get done, but I often try and slip it into commissioned work, or books. I don’t usually class my picture books as self-initiated, because there’s still a client, but I suppose it fulfills the same purpose for me; it’s a way of cutting loose and exploring my own ideas.

Kirill: And on a related note, do you ever get to take a break as a free-lance illustrator?

Owen: Nope. It’s all I think about most of the time. I do other creative things, and live my life, but it all leads back into illustration in the end. I take time off, but I usually illustrate in it anyway. My last 3 holidays have all had mini commissions happening throughout them, but they paid for the holidays, so yay to me!

Kirill: What’s the best thing about being an illustrator?

Owen: Being paid to do what I love.

Animation still from the Wisdomap Medicine project.

And here I’d like to thank Owen Davey for taking time to answer my questions. You can find Owen online on his site, his blog and Twitter. Selected prints are available for sale over at Big Cartel.

Kirill: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in the field.

Zara: I’m a UK-based illustrator originally from the Walsall in the West Midlands, currently based in the North East of England. I studied on a foundation course at Stafford College and went on to complete a degree in Illustration at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

I’ve been working as a professional illustrator since graduating in 2008. I work with UK and international clients on a wide range of projects across areas including editorial, advertising and more.

Kirill: How has your own stylistic taste evolved over the years? Is there ever a thought of exploring radically different directions? Is there a concern of falling into a certain rigidity of style?

Zara: I am interested in a wide range of aesthetics, beyond design and illustration – I have always been very interested in art, photography and film, for example. I don’t think I’ve ever had one particular stylistic taste – there is so much out there that I admire. I have a blog called Hovering Cat where I have been sharing my favourite finds since 2007.

Concerns about my own style never figure consciously when I am working – the way I work today has evolved from years of developing my process and will most likely continue to change as I carry on making small alterations based on playing and experimenting.

It’s difficult for me to see my own style, the same way that I don’t hear my own accent when speaking. I never notice it until someone points it out to me. Perhaps that’s what style is – the voice in which you naturally speak, not influencing what you say but how you say it. I use my style to communicate and will sometimes alter my tone or the way I word something but at the core it will always be my pronunciation and delivery.

Left – illustration for ShopSmart magazine, right – illustration for Delicious magazine.

Kirill: And on the flip side, do you want people to recognize your work the first time they see your new illustrations?

Zara: People do seem to know it’s my work when they see new pieces but it’s more important to me that the illustrations resonate with people. My work is about communication first and foremost.

My name isn’t the first thing I expect people to think when they see the work, though I think my work is distinct and I aim for it to be eye-catching. There is personality in my work but I don’t want it to be overbearing at the expense of the message I wish to convey.

Kirill: When you transfer your pencil sketches to the digital world, do you try to preserve some amount of hand-drawn imperfection? Is this important to you?

Zara: Sometimes – it depends on the illustration, so I decide on a case-by-case basis. It used to be a bigger concern for me than it is today but I now feel less precious towards my sketches. Imperfection does not equal authenticity – clarity and editing is important, too. Sometimes symmetry and clean lines are required and sometimes a less perfect line or a degree of wonkiness helps.

I aim to be flexible and not so linear in the way I work, both literally and figuratively. My sketching is not hugely influential on the final piece in terms of the finish and manner in which it’s completed. I like to work ideas up a bit more digitally before showing them to clients, to give a better idea of my direction.

Kirill: Do you find yourself spending “too much” time on progressively smaller details? Do you ever wish to go back and tweak a certain illustration after it’s already been published by the client?

Zara: I like to keep illustrations simple and graphic whenever possible. I try not to add smaller details unless they say something or add significantly to the appearance of an illustration. There is always the temptation to dwell on details if work has been completed in advance of a deadline – I’ve found the time is better used by taking a step back and returning with fresh eyes. I try to spend time editing my illustrations, stripping back any extraneous elements.

If a client has published a piece of commissioned work and I later decide to add the image to my portfolio, I might sometimes choose to alter it slightly. It doesn’t mean that I was unhappy with the illustration when published but rather that changing it could help it to fit better alongside other pieces in my portfolio. I guess the fresh eyes also play a part – sometimes time away from an illustration can give a new perspective when revisiting.

Left – starman, right – retro rainbow.

Kirill: What’s the weirdest client feedback you ever received, if you don’t mind sharing it?

Zara: I was commissioned to create an illustration to accompany an article about wine tasting – upon sending the roughs, I was informed that alcohol could not be depicted within the illustration.

Kirill: Would it be wrong to say that drawing human figures is one of your favorite areas?

Zara: I’ve enjoyed drawing people a lot more since working professionally as an illustrator. At university, I often disliked drawing human figures, due to the way life drawing was taught as a strictly representational exercise. All imagination was eliminated from the process and it certainly was not my favourite area.

I started to enjoy it more when I realised that people could be drawn in a way that matched my graphic design approach and did not have to be so realistic. By simplifying and refining complex areas of human anatomy, worrying less about the “right” and “wrong” ways to do things, people feel more integrated into my compositions and I have more freedom over the way figures can be portrayed.

Kirill: How valuable is self-initiated work for you?

Zara: I would say that it is invaluable. I focus on self-initiated projects whenever I’m not working on commissions. I probably end up doing as much personal work as commissioned – I try to do as much as possible. It’s crucially important to draw images you enjoy and tackle the sort of subject matters you really want to explore. I think this helps me to retain my voice.

Working on self-initiated projects also enables me to try out different ways of working that sometimes inform future commissions. My personal work feeds into my commissioned work, especially when clients cite self-initiated pieces for the direction of a job.

Self initiated “Glare” illustrations (part 1, part 2).

Kirill: And on a related note, do you ever get to take a break as a free-lance illustrator?

Zara: Yes, though I’m still learning to balance my time – I try to make sure that I take the opportunity to have a break when things are quieter, though my immediate impulse is to work on personal illustrations in that time. I think it’s easier when I travel to a different location as the temptation isn’t there to sit behind a desk – the change of scenery can be a pleasant distraction and there is extra motivation to go out and explore.

Kirill: There’s a recent surge of interest in mid-century inspired illustration, photography, fashion and design. Do you see this as a younger “digital” generation trying to recreate the old “analogue” look and capture that spirit?

Zara: I think that this is the reason in some cases. I have a theory that it could be the result of increased access to media from a wider range of times and places. This fits what is happening within wider culture. A comparison could be made to young musicians, who are now able to listen to music from any era thanks to online music services and are therefore influenced or inspired by a broader collection of artists. The sheer volume of material that might never have been seen before is now shared widely with a receptive audience.

Personally, I prefer to embrace the values of mid-century design rather than try to emulate an aesthetic. These principles are appealing in their positivity and playfulness. I want my work to have the same timeless, classic quality inherent in work produced during that era.

Illustrations for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Kirill: What do you think when you look at your own work from a few years ago?

Zara: Some pieces stand the test of time better than others but I feel that I have come a long way in the few years I have been working professionally. I sometimes catch sight of illustrations lurking in my archive that I remember being really pleased with at the time and now…not so much.

However, I try not to be too critical of my older work – it has acted as a step towards what I am doing today and one day, the work I am doing today will be considered “old work”. Besides, my favourite piece of work is almost always my most recent.

Kirill: What’s the best thing about being an illustrator?

Zara: I like not knowing what I’ll be doing from one week to the next – it can be a slightly scary way to earn a living but it’s also exciting.

I also like the continuous consumption of coffee.

Illustration for an email newsletter.

And here I’d like to thank Zara Picken for taking the time out of her busy schedule to do this interview. You can find Zara’s work on her site, her blog and her Flickr stream. Zara also has active presence on Dribbble and Behance. You can buy selected prints over at Society6.

When you look inside NASA control centers and spacecraft, the graphics do not appear very futuristic. Same if you go inside an air traffic control room and nuclear submarines – all of these very mission-critical settings. The graphics don’t become more sophisticated. If anything, they become simpler and more basic. You’re dealing with such important data that has to be processed.

In one scene, Shaw hobbles over to the medipod to initiate a Caesarian to remove the trilobite from her body. She presses the red “Emergency” label on the screen (it’s not clear if this label is red before she touched it, and the earlier introduction of the equipment does not provide a clear view of the default presentation). In response, the automated voice says “Emergency procedure initiated, please verbally state the nature of your injury.” The first part is reinforcing the acknowledgment of the selection, and the second part guides Shaw to state the next command verbally. As Shaw says “I need Caesarian” the voice replies “Error, this medpod is calibrated for male patients only. It does not offer the procedure you have requested. Please seek medical assistance elsewhere.” She then initiates manual selection mode, making quick taps on the selector wheel and saying “Surgery. Abdominal. Penetrating injuries. Foreign body. Initiate.” which completes the selection phase and opens the pod.

Christopher Noessel over at the “Make It So” blog dissects this sequence:

Aside from the pointless “tension-building” wrong-gender plot point, there are still interface issues with this step. Why does she need to press the emergency button in the first place? The pod has a voice interface. Why can’t she just shout “Emergency!” or even better, “Help me!” Isn’t that more suited to an emergency situation? Why is a menu of procedures the default main screen? Shouldn’t it be a prompt to speak, and have the menu there for mute people or if silence is called for? And shouldn’t it provide a type-ahead control rather than a multi-facet selection list?
…
Why does Shaw need to speak in this stilted speech? In a panicked or medical emergency situation, proper computer syntax should be the last thing on a user’s mind. Let the patient shout the information however they need to, like “I’ve got an alien in my abdomen! I need it to be surgically removed now!”

I disagree. Natural language processing is a daunting task on its own. While false interpretation of voice commands is annoying when you dictate a memo, incorrectly interpreting a medical emergency from the words of a distressed patient can have quick and lethal implications. Particularly in a system clearly designed for a particular person – Peter Weyland.

After the first voice-based interaction, as the system correctly recognizes an unsupported precisely-defined medical procedure, it does not presume to offer alternatives, or attempt to parse additional voice descriptions of Shaw’s situation. Instead, the manual selection interface offers an impressively quick way for Shaw to navigate the tree of available options and choose the specific supported procedure. And while the first impression is that Shaw is continuing to issue voice commands to navigate this menu, the second part of the sequence clearly shows her using the on-screen selector wheel – merely commenting her selections for the viewer’s sake.

The remarkable efficiency of this selection requires a certain degree of proficiency interacting with computer systems – which is implicitly expected from all passengers aboard this scientific expedition. The speed of this interaction is even more remarkable after watching the 3D re-release of “Jurassic Park” and its infamous “It’s a UNIX system! I know this!” scene, where it takes Lex 56 seconds to navigate the three-dimensional flyover rendering of the file system to locate the component that locks the laboratory doors.

While the sequence highlights the novelty of the interface, it also underscores the poor usability of the system even if you are familiar with it – with unnecessarily long transitions that follow each particular selection, and grotesquely zooming in on a very small part of the overall hierarchy.

It takes a more focused watching of “Prometheus” to see how pervasive computer screens are aboard the ship – on the bridge, in the science lab, in the airlock chamber and around the medipod. And yet the interaction is minimal. Actually, the only explicit interaction seems to be when Charlie turns on the projection cube and proceeds to swipe the hologram projections of cave paintings. The rest is relegated to pure visualization – such as the initial descent path of the ship, the DNA sequence matching or the diagnostic scan of Shaw’s abdomen inside the medipod. It’s as if the software is written to know what needs to be presented at any point in time without lengthy explicit instructions from the crew.

When you don’t have complex interaction patterns, you have fewer points of failure. While a crash in the DNA sequence matcher is a marginal waste of time, a crash in the descent tracker or the medipod is a matter of life and death. Removing interaction complexity or, in fact – removing the need for the explicit interaction once the intent is understood – is a key part in how the human-computer interaction is presented throughout “Prometheus”.

There are two systems worth noting for their uncommonly complex visualization layer. The first is the Holotable on the bridge, and the second is the Engineers’ spacecraft control room – the Orrery. Both are featured prominently throughout the movie, but yet both are displayed as low-risk systems.

While the Holotable displays the visual structure of the dome as scanned by the laser “pups”, what happens if some part of that system crashes? Not much probably. The crew would miss some part of the scan, or see incorrect position of the probes, or miss the Engineers’ spacecraft. In fact, the sequence where Janek realizes that the underground structure is a spacecraft shows quite clearly that it was visible in the scan the entire time after David has opened its doors – even as he turned off his shoulder camera. If anything, failing to see the spacecraft in the rendering is a human failure.

The Orrery itself is an interesting experimentation in visualizing planetary systems. However, it seems to purposefully stay as far away as possible from presenting the “quantum leap” interfaces that might be just within our reach if only we stop focusing on the next incremental improvements to the existing ways we interact with computers. If anything, the overhead shots of the deck Engineer, combined with booting the system by playing a flute portray this interaction as playing a musical instrument. If you’re interested in a deeper analysis of this navigational interface, click over to the “Make It So” blog.

Overall, the visual prominence of holographic stereo projections – mainly highlighted in the Holotable and the Orrery sequences -  overshadows an interesting take on portraying human-computer interactions in movies. Computer screens are pervasive aboard the ship, and yet the amount of actual interaction required to accomplish the specific tasks is minimal.

Natural language voice input for a predefined set of tasks, predictive surfacing of relevant information, concise visual representation of salient data and simple touch-based interaction as the fallback for cases where incorrect interpretation of the user intent has life-threatening implications. These are some great ideas that deserve exploration in the real-world software.

Kirill: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Shaun: I’m originally from Melbourne, Australia. I studied Multimedia Design at Swinburne University; it was a mix of web, animation, video and graphic design. During that time I worked as a web designer, and this web agency shared office space with a film production company, Exit Films, who made commercials and music videos. I was really interested in the work they were doing, so during the time I was working at this web company – I helped them do motion graphics, and also worked as a director’s assistant. I tried to get on set and see the whole process of what it takes to make a film.

In hindsight I was so lucky with the filmmakers I worked with – people like Garth Davis, Glendyn Ivin, Greig Fraser, they’ve subsequently gone on to achieve so much. It was an experience where I knew I had so much to learn; and was lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

After that I kept working mainly in animated commercials, and was then employed by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image which is a cultural institution which exhibits moving image in all forms, from film to games and contemporary art. I did all of their motion graphics promotional work. It was an interesting break from commercial clients, and great to explore a wide breadth of the moving image cultures.

In 2006 I was lucky enough to win a grant with the British Council to come to London and meet with some British designers who I admired. Through that I met Toby Glover who designed “Batman Begins” and a whole host of other screen graphics for films. We got along quite well, and worked together on some projects, and a year later he said “The Dark Knight” was going to be made, and asked if I would be interested, and I said “Of course!”

Kirill: Were you always interested in working in movies, or did it come together like that?

Shaun: I always loved watching movies and loved sci-fi. Whenever I saw a computer on film, I always felt strange. It was one of those things where I felt that maybe I could do that better.

Kirill: Jumping a little bit forward as you talk about making things “better”. The “Alien” franchise started in 1979, and you joined it working on “Prometheus”. How do you define “better”? Is it in terms of raw processing power that you have at your fingertips and how intricate you can get? Is it about improving the interaction design, the visual design, or something else?

Shaun: It wasn’t specifically a technical software solution to making it look more sophisticated, for example I think the computers in Alien are great, they have a very functional aesthetic. But so often screen interaction in film appears very naive, unbelievable as a computer user. And now that I’ve worked on a couple of movies, I can understand why it is a little bit fictitious or a little bit over-dramatized. But back then when I was watching movies, I was thinking that that’s not how computers work, and if I did it, I’d do it properly.

Kirill: And by “everyone” you mean people who are actually into computers…

Shaun: Right, the biggest thing about film is that they have a very broad audience. There’s often dramatic storytelling reasons to present something as it finally appears, rather than being authentic to technology. Balancing design authenticity with narrative concerns is probably the greatest challenge of the job.

Kirill: Is it a back-and-forth process on the set, defining how “realistic” the interactions with computers are? Do you ever get feedback that what happens on the computer screens is too boring?

Shaun: It depends on the movie. For example, in “Dark Knight” all the screen designs – which were designed with Toby Glover and Andrew Booth – are all DOS-based, engineering-based, very realistic, often sparse. It was about believability, and in that case the director never said that it’s too boring and let’s jazz it up. On the other side, “Prometheus” and “Skyfall” are very much about how can we show something that is beyond what a normal person is used to. “Prometheus” is set in the future, and it has to be more than what viewers are used to now, similarly with “Skyfall”, an element of a higher level of computers that the public doesn’t usually see. Obviously it’s a little bit of fantasy, but it was an important aspect of how the directors wanted to present computers in those films.

Kirill: I have to say that after watching “Skyfall” a couple of times, I noticed that most of these sequences involve terminal-based interactions, with no flying 3D models of file systems. Every once in awhile it switched to vector maps of Britain, with a few textual layers on top of them, but otherwise, compared to the “usual” movie interfaces, it was very basic. Was the intent to expose a more technical side of things?

Shaun: I’m really glad that you’ve said that. A lot of the articles regarding the computers of “Skyfall” scrutinised the hacking sequences because they are quite fantastically graphical. On “Skyfall” I worked for Blind Ltd, which is Andrew Booth’s company who I met through “The Dark Knight”. We really liked presenting information as text, like terminal – because this is what a lot of hi-tech computer users see. It actually much more technical than some fancy 3D graphical interface.

The one sequence where Sam Mendes really wanted to exaggerate the computer graphics was in the “Q Branch” where Q hacks (or is hacked by) Silva’s laptop. There was a lot of script writing about the nature of the computer information and how Q was manipulating it.  We presented the obfuscated code which is a spindly organic graphic (the polymorphic engine), which eventually transitioned to the depiction of the London Underground. While that graphic sequence doesn’t represent computer hacking realistically, it was really a case trying to combining code and terminal-based interaction to manipulate these more evocative storytelling graphics.

“Skyfall” Q-Branch storyboards. Courtesy of Shaun Yue & BLIND LTD.

Kirill: Was this look driven from your side, or more by the director?

Shaun: I came on to Skyfall a little late due to prior commitments. By the time I joined, Andrew and his team had defined a lot of the look of MI6, how the windows worked together, and the user interface – they had designed it and presented to the director. It’s a collaborative process, but directors are generally more concerned with storytelling than UI specifics. One thing that we did was that when you see MI6 computers in the bunker and on the laptops – the style is quite rigid and robust – and then when you see Q later on, the operating system is all changed a into a more open, transparent blue interface. Like Q OS version 2. That was something which we liked to incorporate into the film as a bit of storytelling through the interface design, even though it’s quite subtle and not part of the main narrative.

“Skyfall” Q-Branch storyboards. Courtesy of Shaun Yue & BLIND LTD.

Kirill: Trying to draw a parallel between “Dark Knight” and “Skyfall”, if my memory serves me right, I don’t recall any kind of direct interaction between the main characters – Batman / Bond – and the computer. They look at the screens, but the interaction itself is delegated to the assistant figures – Alfred / Q.

Shaun: That’s a good point. I never really thought about Batman not using a computer that much, but I guess he has a lot of other cool gadgets!

In “Skyfall” they took Q and instead of having him as the “gadget” man, they wanted to reintroduce him as a response to modern technology, living in a world of cyber-terrorism prevalent in today’s age. Q had to completely relate to that world.

Although in the scene where they hack into Silva’s laptop, it is Bond who deciphers the key that unlocks the map. So even though Q providing the technology, the script emphasised Bond’s contribution and let him interact in a way which was natural for his character.

Silva’s obfuscated map unfolded. Courtesy of Shaun Yue & BLIND LTD.

Kirill: “Casino Royale” was set to be the genesis of James Bond, and it was also the first one with Daniel Craig. “Quantum of Solace” picks off where it left, with Bond avenging the death of Vesper Lind. And now “Skyfall” has only one explicit timeline reference to the active period of service of Silva – in the late 1980s. But apart from that this film, at least for me, still feels like the part of the prequels to the originals, shaping his character throughout these three movies. Was this ever explicitly stated as a guideline for you, to kind of tone down the sophistication of the computer systems?

Shaun: The screen design in “Quantum of Solace” was heavily stylised and the technology quite speculative. For “Skyfall” I think the idea was very much to bring the graphic style to something more contemporary and in our world rather than fantasy.  But you do present an intriguing timeline of events when it comes to the Bond franchise, however it was never explicit, obviously also with M’s death.

I think that one thing that Sam Mendes did really well on this film was to take the 50th year of Bond – an important historical milestone – to look at the past and to celebrate it, and at the same time re-calibrate it for the future, on its own terms.

Kirill: Stepping back from the specific movie, what do you call yourself? There are a few definitions floating around, from screen graphics to motion graphics to fantasy user interfaces. Which one are you?

Shaun: It’s challenging for me because I do screen graphics for films, cinematics for games, and also work on commercials and music promos which is a mix of compositing and motion graphics. “Motion graphics” or “moving image designer” are functional titles because you’re making graphics change over time. It doesn’t matter what medium or context it’s for. I’m quite interested in lots of different mediums and contexts, not just film.

Kirill: Do you like the term “Fantasy UIs” in movies? Does it imply that they are too way out there?

Shaun: Regarding FUI, I think “Fictitious UIs” is more accurate. Not every job we do is fantasy. For example, at the moment I’m working on a film that’s set in the last couple of years, and every design we do, we try to make it as authentic as possible. We’re being really meticulous about what timeframe the UI is from, and what timeframe the content and websites are from. Even Youtube, you look at it in 2012, and it’s different from 2010 and 2008. It moves so fast, and thank goodness for the Wayback Machine.

I’ve really enjoyed that job because of the emphasis on authenticity, and because it’s very close to the job that art director does on a film. It’s not all about the coolest most fantastical thing you can design. It’s all about what can you offer as a craftsperson to contribute to the story. I’ve never personally used the term FUI [Fantasy UI]. I just say screen graphics, that’s what we’re designing – graphics which appear on screens. To be honest, I think it’s more important to be believable than fantastical.

Defining the color language of “Prometheus” screens. Note how each subsystem gets its own distinct accent color – green for bridge, magenta for science/medical and yellow for generic. This is reflected throughout all the screens in the movie. Courtesy of Shaun Yue.

Kirill: But then you take “Prometheus” which is set 70 years in the future. You have to go futuristic, you have to go a little bit into the fantasy land because you don’t have anything to fall back on.

Shaun: How did you feel about the UI design in “Prometheus”?

Kirill: I like the movie itself. It was very polarizing. There was no indifference, people either loved it or hated it. I enjoyed the interfaces themselves, and how they were integrated into the stereo productions. And I also didn’t think that it was that much into the future, given the depth and breadth of current explorations in the field of UX and UI design.

Shaun: I think that’s a completely relevant observation. We visited scientists and other experts to discuss what might be in the future 70 years. And they said 70 years is so far ahead that we can’t predict it. We were talking about holograms, cameras which can read your mood, 3D printing that can morph in real time – maybe that could replace a screen. So many speculative discussions.

Although we were specifically asked to disregard Alien, part of me worried about departing too far from the original.  It has its own distinct aesthetic, and a lot Prometheus’ set design referenced from Ron Cobb’s designs on Alien. So how could we present something that couple hypothetically co-exist with Alien?

When you look inside NASA control centers and spacecraft, the graphics do not appear very futuristic. Same if you go inside an air traffic control room and nuclear submarines – all of these very mission-critical settings. The graphics don’t become more sophisticated. If anything, they become simpler and more basic. You’re dealing with such important data that has to be processed.

Bridge screen graphics for tracking the descent. Note the pervasive usage of green accent color. Courtesy of Shaun Yue.

Kirill: You can’t afford to be fancy and introduce another vector of bugs and crashes…

Shaun: That’s right. I was thinking about embracing “Alien”, pure texts or pure data, creating this link between the two films. However to be honest, Ridley Scott and Sonja Klaus (the set decorator) were not keen on that idea at all. He said “iPhones are boring!” It had to feel futuristic to the audience. It was pretty challenging, because like you say, the result is not strictly super futuristic when you look at some recent real world developments.

There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that these days we have iPhones, iPads, these amazing devices in our pockets. And to do that sort of thing on set requires software developers and being able to design graphics on set, almost like designing software to go onto shoot. And that is just to replicate current technology, let alone something 70 years in the future. Pre-production was really quick, we had to go from blank sheet to being on set with 200 screens in about 12 weeks. That involved not just the physical production of it, but also going through the design process with Ridley and Sonja.

Science lab – still from the final movie. Note the number and variety of screens on the walls.

Kirill: Just to clarify, what we see in “Prometheus” was playback on set, not adding this graphics in post-production?

Shaun: There was a combination of on-set and post-production graphics, and my involvement was with the on-set screens.  I was based at Pinewood for almost six months while they were shooting the interiors. We had around 250 physical screens, from inside of the bridge, the vehicles, corridors, mess deck, science labs, even the costumes had a dozen internal screens – a lot of physical screens. In addition to the creative process there was a massive amount of logistics in procuring and installing the functioning screens.  George Simons did a stellar job supervising the whole process.

In way it helped bridge Prometheus into the world of Alien, because the previous film had quite a distinctive screen presence.

As you say, in the future you probably won’t have physical screens. Everything will probably be a hologram. To be honest, in my mind in the future you will have images implanted into your brain. The idea of a screen in the future is quite regressive, but in designing sets for films its a practical reality.

Science lab screen graphics. Note the pervasive usage of magenta accent color. Courtesy of Shaun Yue.

Medical lab screen graphics. Note the pervasive usage of magenta accent color. Courtesy of Shaun Yue.

Kirill: Regressive, but simpler to explain to the contemporary audience…

Shaun: Yes, can you imagine if you had everyone had their brains just plugged in? It wouldn’t make for a very visually dramatic bridge, would it? It would have to be incorporated at the script-writing stage.  Fundamentally, the way Ridley approached screen graphics for this film was very much to not worry about usability, or how things might look in the future, just approach it as an artistic task. We’re providing color and light and texture to the sets, and not worrying too much about what the future is actually going to be in 70 years. It will be completely different, and it’s not about predicting the future, but rather about creating an interesting impression. It was almost like we were making moving paintings to be put around the set.

Kirill: Did you do anything in the post-production stage?

Shaun: Unfortunately I wasn’t involved in post, as I had moved onto “Skyfall”.  My involvement was really from pre-production, and throughout principal photography, however many of the design elements and ideas we developed for the on-set graphics were incorporated into the post shots.

The visual effects studios did a great job with the post graphics.  There was the alien planetary system – the orrery, the holo-table and also the Alien digital recordings. One of the lead companies for that work was Fuel VFX, it’s always heartening to see great work coming out of Australia.

Post-production provides the opportunity to present graphics in the most futuristic speculative way without the physical constraints of on-set shooting, so it was a critical element on Prometheus.

Prometheus holo-table designed by Fuel VFX.

Kirill: Was it any different for you to work on a production shot in stereo?

Shaun: Because the graphics were on set, there was no difference at all. In the end, you’re presenting something physical. One great thing they did on this production was to do as much as possible practically – whether that was the sets or stunts or the special effects or, in our case, the screens. It really helped the image feel tangible and not synthetic.

Originally there was talk about having holograms on top of the pilots’ consoles on the Bridge, but in the end due to cost they used projections, and while that doesn’t look as futuristic as a hologram, the thing that you gained was the light spilling onto the set and onto the actors – a lot like in the opening sequence in the original film where you see the screens reflecting onto the helmets. That’s something that would be very difficult to do in post. In terms of the stereo, as you’re shooting something physical, it’s fine.

Kirill: Do you have any problems shooting physical screens and getting the camera shutter out of sync with the vertical synchronization of the screens?

Shaun: I’m not super-technical with the actual playback of screens – we had a team from Mark Jordan’s company, Compuhire. If it’s LCD, it’s fine. You can shoot those, but back in the old days of CRT monitors you had to synchronize their refresh to the film cameras, which made things a little bit more complicated. But now you just need to make sure that the color temperature is right.

Kirill: As the time goes on, do you need to be more meticulous as we’re moving towards ever growing resolutions on the side of both shooting and theater / home viewing?

Shaun: These days you might have a screen that is HD, almost film resolution. We’re having to do animations to play on set that are almost the same resolution as the visual effects shots in the final film, but we have to do a hundred of them in the same frame. It’s pretty crazy. For example, the screen that Q interacts with – that’s a 4K screen. That’s a higher resolution than the Alexa camera they were shooting with. It’s pretty challenging because it’s quite easy to upgrade monitors, and and it can result a massive amount of data and rendering. And you don’t get any more time, you just hope that computers get faster!

Kirill: And even with the ever-increasing capacity on both hardware and software tools available to create screen graphics and visual effects, it seems that the complexity and cost of creating them is climbing ever higher and higher. Is it the growing demands from the directors, or your own competitive desire to create something uniquely impressive for every production?

Shaun: Definitely directors want the most they can possibly get, and that’s totally understandable. And as artists, if we get a faster computer, we’ll try to use it even more. We’ll always try to produce even better work. It never really ends, we’re insatiable when it comes to speed and just wanting to do better work. I think everyone wants the same,  to do a really work that we’re all proud of.

Kirill: Is the industry in the arms race against itself?

Shaun: It’s really competitive. Everyone wants to do great work, and we would like to do it as economically as possible. Maybe some tasks will become easier and more economical, but there’s always the type of film that’s pushing the boundary as far as possible. Even if it’s not pushing the boundary in quality, it might push the quantity – and to to produce it all on a shorter schedule. Potentially the technology can solve a lot of problems, but in the end these economic constraints will probably never be resolved because clients always want to raise the bar, and that’s a natural desire.

Kirill: I keep going back to “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” as this attempt to create the entire world inside a computer-generated environment, with actors moving in a completely green screen sets, or “Beowulf” that tried to enhance the facial expressions of the actors and got into this uncomfortable uncanny valley. Will we see more experimentations of this nature?

Shaun: You just have to look at “Avatar” – that is the template for a successful CG based film production. What is successful in that film is fully CG, and that will grow. I don’t think it will replace physical sets, because most films can’t afford to have everything made on a computer – it’s really expensive. It’s expensive because to create a photorealistic version of the simplest set, requires many artist-hours and so much render time, and why do that when you can have that simple set that looks photographic physically, and real actors that interacting with it. Photoreal CGI productions will grow, but it will never replace something that can be done quickly, cheaply and effectively.

Kirill: But that brings it back to “Avatar” and to how many directors can pull off such an enormous budgetary request from the studios.

Shaun: The thing that makes James Cameron amazing is that he had a vision to say that he was going to make a virtual film, and the idea of reconstructing virtual sets in a physical environment – all the terrain that the motion-captured characters walk on – they created that physically. It wasn’t a visually representative set, but rather these puzzle pieces where they could walk up and down slopes, sort of a big volumetric playground. That was really innovative, and the fact that he placed himself into the scene, allowed the talent act towards camera – he really took conventional filmmaking and put it into this virtual world.

It is still a different style of filmmaking, and if other directors are interested in that approach, then I’m sure it will grow.

Kirill: And in between your work on feature films you also worked on cinematic trailers for two big games – Crysis and Call of Duty. Can you talk a little bit about what is actually involved there?

Shaun: Again I worked with Blind on Crysis 2 and 3 for Crytek/EA, and with a another London company, Spov on the cinematics for Modern Warfare 3 (Sledgehammer Games/EA).

It is about taking the game assets and creating these storytelling sequences that go in between missions. It’s a good way for the player to relax a bit and receive a bit of a passive storytelling. It’s interesting because you’re telling the story through the screen graphics. Unlike the film where you’re not sure if or how they’re going to shoot it, on a game you know it will be closely scrutinized, and you’ve got to tell the whole story. You don’t have the aid of the editing or actors, the flow of the film plot to help you. I find that really interesting – telling a story purely through user interface graphics.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 game cinematic, produced at Spov Ltd.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 game cinematic, produced at Spov Ltd.

Kirill: Are these requests from games studios heavily scripted?

Shaun: They start with scripts, and hopefully you get voiceover for timing. The scripts have general narrative objectives, but games companies like to keep things flexible. They can change things sometimes quite late, but at the same time they also give us a lot of opportunity to push our own ideas.

Kirill: How would you compare working on feature films to working on shorter game cinematic sequences?

Shaun: A 30- or 60-second shot on a film is a really long shot. You’re doing more work on these game sequences than you are on individual screen in a film. On a film you have to do a hundred screens, or maybe you’ll get a key sequence. It’s a comparable amount of work. The tricky thing with games, as I said earlier, is that it’s the animated sequence in isolation, so you have total responsibility over the storytelling.

The difference with these game cinematics, you’re producing almost everything in that sequence, whereas on a film you are part of a much larger group. There are all these people that built sets, costumes, actors, and amazing cinematographers all combining into a concentrated moment, whereas on a game you have 30 seconds almost all to yourself.

Crysis 2 game cinematic, produced at BLIND LTD.

Crysis 2 game cinematic, produced at BLIND LTD.

Kirill: Let’s talk about the software. The things you create for the sets of “Prometheus” or “Skyfall” are not fully-fledged stacks with layers of networking, database and what not. You’re effectively creating the tip of the iceberg. Is it liberating to create software that you don’t need to maintain, evolve or to sell to people?

Shaun: I’ve never worked as a software developer, other than when I worked as a web designer – which doesn’t really count. But even then I found it pretty frustrating. That was back in 2001, and you had to test it on all the different browsers and different operating systems, there seemed to be less standards, you couldn’t even be sure how text would appear. It felt pretty unsatisfying as a visual designer.

When you’re designing for films, you have more control visually. And the way that actors interact with it is quite basic. They don’t literally operate the computers. They might be just advancing a film loop; it is kept really basic. The actors don’t have enough time to learn how to use a piece of software. I really like that we don’t have to do too much development per se. But at the same time I wish I knew more about it, because maybe we can solve some problems more naturally if we created working programs – not necessarily as robust as what you’d produce for general consumption, but something that would increase the level of interactivity on a film set.

Kirill: Do you see the ideas that you and other people are exploring in the movies being influenced and influencing the real world software?

Shaun: Definitely. Whenever we design a screen in a film, we look at actual interfaces that exist. It helps in believability, and it helps just coming up with new ideas – seeing what other people have done. And as far as films influencing the real world? That’s a tricky one. In some ways software is so innovative right now, and I feel that films are a little bit behind. A lot of films these days use gestural interfaces because of the iPhone, and to be honest, I’m sure there are interaction models way beyond just swipe and pinch that we will see in the real world. Look at Google Glass, for example. When you’re solving these kinds of software development  problems, you’re innovating a lot more than presenting graphics in a film.

A film is about storytelling, about visual design and aesthetics most of the time. If a film influences some of the real world, that’s an amazing moment. But to be honest, I’m not sure software developers need influencing. Everything is moving so fast and they are right at the cutting edge.

Airlock screen graphics. Note the pervasive usage of yellow accent color. Courtesy of Shaun Yue.

Kirill: But going back to what you said, reading brainwaves and automatically acting upon those is not something you can easily put on the screen and contribute to the story in a meaningful way. Or even with Google Glass, you’d have to constantly switch between what the person sees on that small screen, and what is happening around her.

Shaun: Films have to tell stories, and every decision is based on that. As you say, it’s very challenging to try and present these new technologies in film. The people making the films need to have a progressive interest in technology, Alex McDowell is a good example, otherwise it may not be presented in an innovative way. That’s probably the biggest challenge that film screen graphics has currently.

Kirill: Do you ever think of looking back at your work in 15 years and thinking how ridiculous it looks with the knowledge of what actually happened in between?

Shaun: I’m more afraid of it looking ridiculous on the movie’s opening weekend [laughs]. It will definitely look unrealistic in 15-20 years. For me, it’s about working with great people on really interesting projects. Working on the 50th anniversary Bond felt like a huge privilege – to work with Sam Mendes and be part of his vision for what he wanted that film to be. And if computer graphics date a bit, that’s not really a problem because this film was made in 2012. It’s not about predicting the future, it’s about presenting a design idea and contributing to the film’s narrative, and hopefully it stands up on its own. All technology dates.

Kirill: How does it work on a more technical side of things? Does what you create in your tools go directly to on-set screens?

Shaun: It depends. If the display is in the background, it might just be a video loop. We design it in After Effects and it looks like an active UI, but it’s just a QuickTime or image sequence loop. But when you get a more complicated scene, like when Shaw interacts with the medipod in “Prometheus”, when she touches the panel and says she needs a Caesarean, that was built as an interactive set of video loops. In this case the actor is interacting with a touch screen, and it has to be coded. You have to tell the actor where to touch – although in that case we had made the whole bottom keyboard panel active so she could do whatever she wanted, and it would work. You don’t have to do any user testing, and in terms of delivering the final product, it’s a very basic piece of software. It’s an actor’s aid.

Kirill: Does your on-set stuff ever crash, causing extra takes?

Shaun: Thankfully that never happened! The tools we use are pretty basic pieces of software so its fairly stable. Sometimes things don’t work as expected, so you might have to make last minute changes or fall back on a Quicktime. That’s why you have to keep things as simple as possible on set, because the most important thing is to film the footage.

Kirill: What’s in your personal list of things that you enjoy watching?

Shaun: I love all sorts of movies. When you work on films, you start appreciating all aspects of craft and that makes any movie interesting. At the moment I’m obsessed with the TV show “Girls”, I’m blown away by its directing and theatricality.

I don’t watch movies specifically for the computer interfaces – that just happens to be my involvement with making films. But it’s been amazing to work with Ridley Scott, as he was a huge influence when I was younger. He has the experience of an older generation, a mix of pragmatism and artistry which seems rarer now as film development seem so corporatised.

Technology has permeated into the society so deeply. When you think about how old Google or Facebook or Twitter is, they barely a decade old, and we take it all for granted now – it’s amazing. When you ask me whether I worry about how something will appear in 15-20 years time – I don’t worry, because I know it’ll be so different. It’s not just the user interface design, it’s also about how information is aggregated, processed and presented.

At the moment the web is still very much a fixed media of text, images and video. Imagine if every video and audio recorded was automatically transcribed, and it was all semantically searchable, maybe using crowdsourcing. Information as it exists right now does not yet feel malleable. It’s getting there, but I think in the future our notion of information will be so different, so fluid. That’s why I don’t worry about how user interfaces appear in a movie because that’s not the only thing that will date. The thing that will date is the fact that information itself is changing.

It slightly scares me that mainstream computing might overtake what happens in the cinema.  We’ll have to rethink how we present technology in film, but that will be really interesting.

And here I’d like to thank Shaun Yue for taking the time out of his busy schedule to talk about crafting screen graphics and user interfaces for movies, and for sharing his process and behind-the-scenes materials with us. Shaun would like to acknowledge the following:

“Skyfall” Screen Graphics by Blind Ltd London.
Supervisor: Andrew Booth
Screen Graphics Designers: Ian Sargent, Shaun Yue, Joe White
3D Artist: Gabor Ekes

“Prometheus” on-set screen graphics design team
Supervisor: George Simons
Screen Graphics Designers: Shaun Yue, David Sheldon-Hicks, Paul Roberts, John Hill, Rheea Aranha

“Skyfall” © 2012 Danjaq, LLC, United Artists Corporation and Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved.

“Prometheus” © 2012 20th Century Fox. All rights reserved.

Kirill: Tell us about yourself and the path that lead you to become a production designer.

Tim: I started off as a production assistant in an office. I was in bands for a while, and then I moved out of New York, and four months later I moved back and my intent was to somehow get into the film business. I had no idea how that would happen, I was 27 at the time and I ended up getting a job as a waiter. I used to work at “Kim’s Video” in New York and I met this guy who came in and asked me if I wanted to be a production assistant on this film that ended up under the name “Return to Paradise”.

I was interested in the film business, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. After about a year and a half working as a production assistant on a bunch of TV shows, like “Spin City” and “The Corruptor” with Chow Yun-Fat, I became a property person. I did that for a long time, from 1999 to about 2004, and I was really fortunate to have worked on the second season of “The Sopranos”. I was on a bunch of films and met property master Peter Gelfman who ended up being my boss for a long time. This lead me to work with Kevin Thompson, who is a production designer and a friend of mine. He’s amazing and really talented; he just did “Bourne Legacy” with Tony Gilroy [director].

And through Kevin I met Harris Savides who just passed away. He was my mentor, and almost like my father. We worked together on “Birth” directed by Jonathan Glazer, with Harris shooting, Kevin designing and me doing props under Peter Gelfman. That’s how I met Harris Savides and we became close friends. He worked with David Fincher, Sophia Coppola and Woody Allen, he was very picky about the jobs that he would take. He knew that I had a desire to move on, to do something more challenging, to do the next thing. He was getting ready to do “Last Days” with Gus Van Sant and he asked me during the re-shoots of “Birth” if I was interested in joining the crew. I ended up getting the job as art director, which was basically production designer. I was the head of art department, and it was very stressful and exciting. So he basically gave me my first shot, and that’s how I got into production design.

I then went on to do smaller films, continuing to do props on the side. Then I got an agent and that opened a bunch of doors, and one thing led to another. I tried to use the Harris Savides model to not just take any job, but doing things that interested me, jobs that I thought would stand out or I’d learn a lot from, different things that wouldn’t pigeonhole me into a sort of category. That thing can happen pretty easily. And that’s how I took “Last Night”. I had never done a romantic drama; it’s not something that completely interests me and I wouldn’t do them all the time, but I definitely wanted to do one and I thought that Massy Tadjedin [director/writer] was an interesting writer. I liked her take on this simple European-style romantic drama. That’s what attracted me to the project.

Kirill: As you moved to assume larger responsibilities, do you find yourself going back to do the small things on your sets?

Tim: “Last Night” had the budget of $7M, which is not that big. I was heavily involved in it. We didn’t do a lot of building, it was almost all locations. We build this small set for Paris which ended up with flashback photographs that two of the characters look at at the end of the film. It was work on transforming locations. I’m very hands on, I’m there helping the decorator decide what we’re putting up. I’m very much involved on a project like that.

Kirill: How different is it when you work with a director who is also the script writer?

Tim: It’s definitely different when you’re working with someone who’s been with the material for so long and has had this film in their head, and has a very specific idea about what this film is, and what the beat should be visually. Massy was very open, but she also had a very specific vision on what she wanted it to be. I think it really comes across. Between her and the cinematographer Peter Deming, they really created New York that you haven’t seen that often. It was almost empty. She was amazing. It was a big undertaking, her first film as a director.

Kirill: You’ve said that you try to pick projects that interest you. Are you looking for new ways to present the story on the screen, or at a new type of script that you haven’t worked on until now?

Tim: It’s a combination of who’s involved and a good story. It’s probably this way for a lot of people, and I really need to be engaged and excited. Otherwise I’m not going to be the best that I want to be, and hopefully can be. I definitely want to have some sort of connection to the project.

Kirill: The specific story of “Last Night” is about emotional and physical infidelity, and it leaves the question about which is more hurtful open to the viewer to decide. When you look at such a script, does your own personal opinion affect the way you approach designing the look and the sets?

Tim: I don’t think so. I’m more of an instincts person. I don’t sit down and really think about what are we doing. I sort of let it seep into my subconscious. It sounds really pretentious, but I try to absorb it and then just go from there. There are, of course, other factors – what does the director want, how much money do we have, how are we going to accomplish this. And it’s more of a feeing that I have. I definitely have my own visual style, just like most designers do. You can see it in the things that I do and I’ve actually been trying to get away from that. Your sensibilities can bleed in too much, and you have to really think.

Kirill: Let’s go back to “Last Night” for a bit. I really liked the apartment set (with Keira Knightley and Sam Worthington) that is this very modern, but very cold place that kind of highlights and augments the lack of physical warmth in their marriage.

Tim: That was definitely what we were going for. We looked at a bunch of apartments in New York, big and small. Obviously you want to shoot in a bigger place so that you have room to work. We decided on that apartment and the ceiling was very low, and I thought that it would be very interesting – sort of oppressive setting. It was a nice clean place, almost felt European to me. The movie didn’t feel to really happen in New York, it could’ve been anywhere. I knew that we were shooting in New York, but when you’re watching, it doesn’t feel like it.

The reason that we chose that place was that it felt right for the characters, and it did have an oppressive vibe. The guy who owned that place owned a restaurant and that’s why you have such a nice kitchen there. We tore everything out of his house and replaced everything, sort of set it up in our own way.

Kirill: As the same set appears at different times in the story, do you prepare it to be slightly tweaked based on the emotion and mood at that particular place in the story line?

Tim: I don’t think there was anything intentional. If you felt this was happening in the film, it might have been more director-driven. Essentially when I hand over the set, I’ll be there, but once he / she has everything, I step away and let them have the set. They move things around, they use the tools that I provide. We were there for 4 or 5 days shooting in that apartment, and as time progressed, Massy probably thought of ways to have that come across. But it was nothing intentional on my part. I was barely on set, it was so tight in there that I stayed away for the most part. I don’t like to linger around sets, and if I can find something else to do, I generally move on and let them have it. It’s better, less pressure.

Kirill: Are you involved in post-production and editing, or are you on to the next one?

Tim: I’m on to the next one. I do my thing and if they’re happy, I’m happy.

Kirill: Does it feel a little weird to see the final film on the big screen, how all those pieces that you’ve worked on are transformed through the lens?

Tim: It does. Peter Deming [director of photography] was amazing. The film looks incredible. You do something, and it’s hard to take yourself away from it in an objective way. It takes a couple of viewings to not think about all the work that you did. The first restaurant in “Last Night” where we see Griffin Dunne – that was a closed restaurant and we had to pull it together in a couple of days.

Kirill: Stepping back from “Last Night”, you then went back to working on TV series, “Rubicon” and “Luck”. How different is it to have a more open-ended stretch of time to develop and enhance the look?

Tim: It’s very different. On “Rubicon” we had seven-day prep and seven-day shoot. I find myself scouting more than being creative. In a way it becomes a decorator’s show. It’s weird because you do a lot of scouting with new directors. It’s definitely a completely different experience than making a film. On a film you prep for however many weeks they allow you, and then you scout with everybody after you find the locations, and everyone figures out the logistics and talks about what they are going to do, and then you’re done and off to make it happen. And on “Rubicon” I was always out scouting, showing directors places.

I had a lot of fun on “Luck”. We had a lot more money than most TV shows because of Michael Mann and David Milch. I worked mainly with Michael Mann and we had a great relationship. I learned a lot from him. He had a lot of control over where we were shooting. Generally I would pick the locations with the locations manager based on the look of the show, but Michael is so involved. He really had the final say, and he would trust me to go in and create the sets that he drove.

Kirill: How different is the dynamics on the set? On a TV show you have the creators who drive the story, and then multiple directors, cinematographers and art directors come in and out for a few episodes each. How do you maintain the look while still letting in their own voices?

Tim: I don’t find that it’s more work. It’s interesting because every director wants to do their own thing within the framework of the show. The biggest job for me is to let them have their freedom, but also help guide them visually. And Michael Mann was also heavily involved. It was less of a case on “Rubicon” where Henry Bromell sort of let me do my thing on the show, and I got to experiment a lot with color. Some stuff worked, some stuff didn’t, and it was fun because they’ve let me experiment. It was a lot more rigid with “Luck” as the framework was already there.

Kirill: Do you also have more time to experiment with the look as the series progresses from episode to episode?

Tim: That’s the thing with Michael Mann, he would just turn a thing on its head. We did a conference room for Dustin Hoffman’s character who has this financial company, and I thought it would be this grand super-opulent office, but it was the complete opposite, sort of nondescript room. But that’s the thing I love about Michael Mann, that he would throw the convention out the window. It really made me change the way I think about the work that I’ll do in the future. The same sort of impact that Harris Savides had on me.

Kirill: Circling back again to wanting to be picky about productions that you work on. How much can you know before starting the actual work and working closely on the sets with the director, the cinematographer and the art director?

Tim: If you get an interview with Gus Van Sant or Darren Aronofsky, you know that you’re going to be working on something special. I just went scouting in New Mexico with Lynne Ramsay. She did “Ratcatcher”, “Morvern Callar” and most recently “We Need to Talk About Kevin”. And now we’re doing a western called “Jane Got a Gun” with Natalie Portman and Michael Fassbender. I was telling her as I told all my friends that when I first got an agent and they said “Who do you want to work with” back in 2005, and I said “Lynne Ramsay.” And it’s really interesting, with really good script, and I’m really excited. If I’m going back to feature films, this is sort of a dream job to re-enter this feature world. I haven’t done a feature since 2009.

Kirill: To step back from specific production into more general area, I’d like to talk about how advances in technology are affecting your job. Are you more precise or meticulous in the world of digital theater projectors and BluRay home players?

Tim: I don’t fell that it has any impact at all. I don’t really work on films that are heavy with digital effects. It’s interesting because it’s creating a whole new generation of production designers that have started off as art directors and it’s become much more technical. We’re going to shoot “Jane Got a Gun” on film which is nice, because I think period should be shot on film. It just feels better, feels like it has a soul. I’m not opposed to digital, but I feel there’s a boundary that it pulls, that the audience is getting too close. Harris Savides was really incredible. He was able to take digital and put the soul into it. And a lot of people are figuring it out and the technology is getting better. I don’t think that it affects the way I do my job. Maybe if I was working on something more technical, I’d definitely have to put more thought into it.

You always have conversations with directors and cinematographers about color choices and things to stay away from. I just worked with Janusz Kaminski on a pilot for AMC, and some of the sets were stark white and he had no problem with it at all.

Kirill: Does it mean that you don’t have to be as precise because so much can be changed in post-production?

Tim: I think so, but there’s also a level of confidence that you have as a cinematographer when it comes time to deal with things that are very harsh. White can be harsh on film and digital. There’s a lot of things that you can do to play with it in post. We had a DIT [digital intermediate technician] on set who was tweaking the way the visuals looked as he was shooting. Digital is very interesting, but I do miss working on films that are shot on film.

Kirill: Is film as a medium going away?

Tim: I don’t think it will ever go away. Humans in general are too nostalgic, and there’s nostalgia for film already. And some people just won’t do digital. Lynne Ramsay wants to shoot film, and it’s a good decision to do period on film. I don’t know what they shot, for example, “True Grit” that Coen brothers did. And it seems that western as a genre is making a resurgence. I think there’s three happening now and we are one of them. It’s one of those genres that is making a comeback.

Kirill: What do you think about fully virtual sets where everything is created by computer and actors operate in a green “empty” set?

Tim: There are a lot of films shot on green screens, with minimal set elements, but I think actors like to be in their environment. If was an actor, I’d want to shoot in a practical location. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. It’s like reality TV vs. scripted TV that live in the same world. And props people are not going to be out of their jobs. The actors are not going to “hold” these digitally created three-dimensional objects on all productions. That’s just never going to happen. May be in 50 years, but I doubt it. We like tangible things. Look at vinyl. It made a comeback. It’s a niche, for sure, but it’s never going to go away, there will always be vinyl, just like there’ll always be film. At least I hope.

People want quality. There are always going to be cookie-cutter films that they pump out to make money. It’s definitely more difficult to get on a quality job, a quality film or television show. And I see more quality television than quality film out there. People are willing to take risks. When I first was going to go to “Rubicon”, my agent told me “Listen, don’t do television. You’re on such a roll with films right now.” But you want to try everything out, you don’t want to get pigeonholed into one thing, you want to spread your wings. But I definitely like films more, even though there’s better television out there. Nailing down a really amazing film is quite difficult, there’s a lot of competition out there.

Kirill: It’s good to have the choice as a viewer.

Tim: It’s always nice to see a small film that cleans up awards-wise at Cannes or Venice. It’s nice when those films get recognized. This business is run by people with money, not by creatives. I’m 42 right now. I have a great affinity for the films in the 70s and European stuff. It’s a director’s medium and it’s been taken away from them, which is a shame. It would be nice to pull it up to now and make it that way again. Instead of having one or two good films a year, you could have twenty that really get people back to the box office. Things always go in cycles, and I think it’s going to end up happening again. Hopefully. People have such easy access to cameras. You can have control on some small scale.

Kirill: Is there any particular production that you would recommend watching?

Tim: That’s a good question. I like all kinds of stuff. I’m a big fan of Scott Ridley. I loved “Prometheus”, I thought it was amazing.

Kirill: It was polarizing. I liked it, and a lot of critics and viewers didn’t.

Tim: Those are always the best. Not the middle road stuff. When I work on a film, if people hate it or love it, that’s great. Even if it’s a small number of people. I read reviews to see if we’ve made an impact. You want to work on the good stuff. The things that I work on, people don’t talk about production design. They did on “The Wrestler”. They mainly talk about the directing and cinematography. It’s not very often they’ll talk about the production designer, unless it’s a period film. Most people think – which I think is flattering, even though it kind of sucks because you want a kind of notoriety sometimes – we try to make the sets look as real as possible, and when you do that, people just don’t take notice. And that’s what I really try to achieve as a designer. You want people to not pay attention to the lamp in the corner, or the wallpaper that you’ve put on. And that’s a very fine line that you have to walk. Most people are like “You walked in and just shot that, right?” and I’d say “No, you don’t realize.”

I was on your site reading the interview with Beth Mickle and her work on “Drive”. I love the work that she did. You have to have these pictures of before and after, when you go to these meetings to show them “Look at the work we did.” Most of the time people are just oblivious.

And here I’d like to thank Tim Grimes for taking time out of his busy schedule to do the interview, and the fine people at The Skouras Agency for putting me in touch with Tim.