In 2012 SPY assembled a small crew of experienced designers to begin tackling the visual interface language to be used on the sci-fi Shymalan/Smith film After Earth. Dav Rauch (Avatar, Iron Man HUD guru) was hired to lead the design team, while I took on CG Supervision of the 250+ shots. Since the show had a very long lead time before actual production started I also became intimately involved with the design process, primarily levaraging my industrial design background into creating the multi-dimensional 'frames' in which all the holographic information lived.
In addition to numerous modules that control the spacecraft, as well as a myriad of life support and communication modules that are integral to the story after the crash landing, we also took on the design and implementation of several hard surface virtual props including collapsible doorways, communication transponders and most notably a fully functional animated topographical 'pin table' that covered the entire surface of the ships dashboard. Since the topography was important for explaining the vast differences in terrain that Kitai (Jaden Smith) faced we had to come up with believable geometry that matched the live action footage. Prior environmental projects had exposed me to the vast amount of DEM data available from the USGS and other sources worldwide and so we relied heavily on real world data for the base of all our pin table visualizations. The Vermillion cliffs in Arizona became the uplifted continental divide Kitai flies along, the vast plain that separated the cliffs from the ship tail were derived from mashing the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania with the plains of Kansas, the redwood forest scenes were lifted directly from their film locations in northern California and the volcano visualizations were formed from Mt. Shasta and Mt. Lassen in California as well. The data was processed through Mudbox, with artists augmenting and refining areas of necessity, and then transferred into Maya ending in a particle system that covered the curved surface of the dashboard which eventually controlled the height and animation of the pins.
Concurrent with the R&D development on the pins, was the design of the frames/UI systems. In simplistic terms we presented three options - a rectilinear, a curvilinear and an organic option. The curvilinear approach was selected and we began developing what that would look like for all 12 modules being created. From the beginning we were tasked with developing systems that worked in 3 dimensions, instead of designing just for a planar surface. The resulting design had a cylindrical nature that countoured the dashboard, with various discs that swiped and rotated to update and reveal information.
With the end of the multi month design phase nearing completion, the visual language of the 3 dimensional informational modules was fairly well flushed out, having been vetted by Shymalan during the final 6 weeks. With the full VFX team now coming on board, final design assets were being made production ready and we started showing slap comps of all modules in a variety of shot situations for another review before completely deploying across all 200+ UI shots. Unfortunately our client had an abrupt change of heart about the overall design direction, which left us somewhat starting anew.
Internally, we painfully agreed with their decision since we were a bit surprised at the option they had chosen for us to explore more fully 2 months prior. The spaceship, based on biomimicry, as were the rest of the cities and general 'world' of After Earth, was in conflict with the cylindrical, machine like holo generators especially when seeing then in larger groups spread across the dashboard. It didn't look bad, it just didn't look 'right'. Thus ensued triage of our production schedule to handle the redesign of the modules, somewhat from scratch, while still trying to adhere to the preset schedule. Hats off to Darnie Davila and Lawson Owen for handling that stress on the production management side, as they found ways to shuffle delivery dates and other milestones to accomodate our new reality. However with the design budget gone as well as the contract pre-production designers, Dav and I shouldered the brunt of the 3D design work, along with Kurt Kaufmann, a super talented conceptual artist who was brought on in very piece meal sections to help us refine and propel our visualizations. As we were unable to find a good modeller who was equally talented in making good design decisions, I ended up splitting my job duties for about a month between CG Supervision and designing/building the final 'frames' that would be used to house all the holographic information.
For the frame redesign our instinct was to try and salvage as much we could from our cylindrical world but integrate it in a more curvilinear style. That way the abundance of 2D work that had been built for the cylindrical concept could still be used. I built an initial generic hybrid model in Maya so that we could pass off to Kurt Kaufman our concept designer, who used it as a guide for his fabulous sketches to push the idea further.
Although we liked the cool product design nature of the frames Kurt was coming up with we ultimately decided that they were not going to work. Everything was too 'real' looking, as this structure is ultimately not a hard surface floating device, but rather a structure based on light and possibly the absence of light (apparently they are manipulating dark matter somehow).
So with the clock ticking we began the final design push. It was decided that I would literally lock myself in a small room away from the main floor of production for half the day so I could focus all my energy on creative thinking. What I decided was that I had to take a completely different approach to desigining/building the frames. Instead of sketching, then playing with simple volumes in Maya I started directly in Maya with the simple mandate that I would 'model' only with curves (5 maximum), with the curves representing the major glints of light. This way I could easily move around a few CVs and look at it from all angles, and revise on the fly until the overall design started feeling right. I kept the general structure of the prior hybrid design direction but abandoned the tight cylindrical constraint. Once the essence of the shape evolved from the curves I then refined it with an actual volume. As time was super tight, all the final designs were pretty much a first pass...
Since the on set design of the ship had a lot of animal biomimicry cues, such as the internal support 'skeleton' that looked like bone, part of the redesign was to introduce more of this essence into the frames. The health module seen below exudes a bit more of the 'structured cartilage' theme we adopted as an integration strategy. We also made sure we allowed spatial volume for our internal 3D information systems (content), as well as more 2D content (text centric) that resides on curved 'screens'. In order to elicit depth control for the 2D content we created 15 layers of screens, each with their own unique STmap, so that the majority of graphics UI could be completely run through Nuke instead of Maya.
Another 'module' that we designed was the arm GUI that Kitai uses during his journey to communicate with his dad and monitor other information. It was originally designed alongside our cylindrical world, and did not need a redesign as it worked fine aesthetically.
With our beloved frames now 'set' we began in earnest on shot production, behind schedule but well optimised. On the Maya side we set up our 3D UI assets (frames and content) with render layer information buried inside time nodes that would be called upon in the master file to rebuild render layers as we wanted to avoid render layers with reference files. No only did it make our master files stable, it allowed us to make lookdev changes on an asset and have it updated in the master file quite easily.
Equally on the Nuke side we needed to manage and update renders easily so we also created scripts that facilitated the building and rebuilding of individual GUI assets in the master file from their individual lookdev comp templates. This also standardized the comps so that anyone on the compositing team could massage and update any shot with relative ease.
Lastly, concurrent with all the modules and other UI requests another hard surface asset we created was the sliding door that seals the ship hallways. Loosely described as collapsible plastic sheathing we went through several iterations of design, especially in the manner in which it opens and closes as it is seen in several shots and pertinent to the story. Fred Lewis tackled the creation and rigging of the model, and Deb Santosa did an excellent job setting up the look dev of the translucent material.
All in all over 225 shots were completed, and several large sequences were done in conjunction with Pixomondo who took care of all the outside space scenes. For the majority of those shots we were given final comps by them and we subsequently ran them as a new backplate through our pipeline so it was fairly strightforward. We also worked with Iloura on a few shots, mostly having them give us some of their animal assets that they created for other sequences, but which we needed for UI creation purposes.