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Copy from DBC Webarchive Copy from: PD4C21 - production design for the 21st century This content has been stored according to an agreement between DBC and the publisher. www.dbc.dk e-mail:[email protected] 28/6/2017 www.kosmorama.org/Artikler/PD4C21.aspx DU ER HER: KOSMORAMA | TIDSSKRIFT FOR FILMFORSKNING OG FILMKULTUR / ARTIKLER / PD4C21 ­ PRODUCTION DESIGN FOR THE 21ST CENTURY PD4C21 - PRODUCTION DESIGN FOR THE 21ST CENTURY 16 JUNI 2017 / ALEX MCDOWELL This provocation challenges the idea of a single author and linear narrative as industrial­age constructs that have not evolved for the twenty­ first century. It introduces world building not only as a design methodology to transcend single media platforms, but as a holistic vision for the future of cinema production and pervasive storytelling in the digital era. We are confronting change within our entertainment media industries at a scale and pace unobserved for over a century, since the earliest days of cinema. Yet if one were to report from within the film industry, one would probably get very little sense of these changes. In any typical production we filmmakers appear to be immune to the disruption that has already upturned other industries, whether medical or mobility, fashion or architecture, military or politics, art or engineering. We need to examine the impact of these developments and consider their potential influence on one another as a necessary evolution towards the new tools for storytelling. We have become habituated to specialized and distinctly siloed media industries, but there is no longer reasonable justification to separate the crafts of film, animation, television, interactive media, theater, mixed reality, and other platforms that do not yet have a name. It is time for the entertainment media industry as a whole to embrace this transformation, from inception through development and production, to increase the creativity, profitability and secure future of our industries. Transmedia is an old descriptor now, but it has still barely touched the media it aspired to change. I believe that it is in the production design and narrative design practice that lies the key to hurdle these traditional barriers, where transformative design semantics are set to slice through these silos. Seventeen years into this digital century, surrounded by innovation, disruptive thinking, and new audiences with radical expectations, perhaps it is time to reframe the evolution of our craft by laying down some core principles of production design for the twenty­first century. These are my unapologetically personal opinions formed from 40 years of experience in designing outcomes in multiple media spaces for audience, industry and education. They are intended to provoke self­ examination of our individual craft and bring to light the imminent and unavoidable evolution of creative practices for the twenty­first century. http://www.kosmorama.org/Artikler/PD4C21.aspx 1/9 28/6/2017 www.kosmorama.org/Artikler/PD4C21.aspx _____________________________________________ “YOU NEVER CHANGE THINGS BY FIGHTING THE EXISTING REALITY. TO CHANGE SOMETHING, BUILD A NEW MODEL THAT MAKES THE EXISTING MODEL OBSOLETE” R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER _____________________________________________ As production designer, I began design of the production of Minority Report (2002) for Steven Spielberg in 2000. We started work without a script, when the writer Scott Frank and I were hired on the same day, and continued to evolve the narrative design for many months first prior to and then in parallel to the script development. What we started with for this film was a simple outline: the where and the when ­ Washington DC, in the year 2050; the central disruption ­ the Precogs, modified from the Philip K. Dick 1956 short story “The Minority Report”; and the framing by Steven Spielberg of the core requirements of the story. Minority Report: The world of Washington DC in 2050, after the crime­prevention experiment of the Precogs creates a massive influx of population and the development of a vertical city. c. 20th Century Fox. We visualized the design of this future world through deep and holistic research that evolved into a ‘2050 bible’. This design manifesto for this specific future world combined real­world knowledge gathered from our research and domain expert collaborations. To which we added future­scientific white papers illustrated with visual story elements. The design, art, diagrams and text were developed in collaboration between the design team, the director and the key creative team into a non­linear evolution of the story components. This fed directly into the script, but also provided a much broader context, early in development. After the film was released and we were able to look back and analyse this unique process, it was clear that something had significantly changed, both in creatively process and in the mechanics of production. The first ‘what if, why not’ questions that prompted these changes came from Steven Spielberg, whose intended narrative for the film demanded that this was not to be science fiction, usually invented within insular cinema production walls, but a ‘future reality’ that required that we bring that reality to life. To actualize this we had to look for collaborations in the real world, first with domain experts in multiple fields that we met in the early think tank gatherings, generating networked access that in turn extended to knowledge resources in multiple industries and institutions. This knowledge­base triggered a multi­layered series of narratives that substantiated the imaginary universe and became the underpinning of the world. To put this new content into practice it became clear that a radical redesign of the process of film design was needed. We started to design for a linear cinematic narrative using a radical and volatile non­linear process, necessitated by the ways in which information was being gathered. Our design was being triggered through our artscience research, the collaborations with real world industries (architecture, urban planning, mobility, fashion, technology, military) and the holistic questions that evolved (about culture, science, infrastructure, technology and ecosystems) – all extrapolating answers for the design of many potential narratives for a future world. And, through osmosis, the process was indeed transformed. The Victorian­era, industrial, linear practice that filmmakers had experienced and practiced for decades was deeply entrenched in the year 2000 film industry, but for us it was rendered almost unrecognizable within our capsule of progressive production by the time Minority Report was released, just three years later. http://www.kosmorama.org/Artikler/PD4C21.aspx 2/9 28/6/2017 www.kosmorama.org/Artikler/PD4C21.aspx The early mapping of a non­linear production process. Digital, distributed, and holistic. Alex McDowell, c. 2004. The practice of narrative design changed – in some ways for ever – during this production. By good fortune, the rigorous demands that Minority Report’s story content was making on our design process (how do you design the architecture of the future when no­one in cinema had access to the tools being used even for contemporary architecture?) was in synch with suddenly accessible new tools. For the first time in cinema, we were hiring young designers, not only from film but from outside practices like architecture, who were equipped with and empowered by sophisticated digital resources, loaded on their laptops. Traditional practice – artwork painted with acrylic on artboard, set design on drawing boards or in CAD – rapidly changed to a new space of shared data and non­ linear design evolution. By the time we had completed production we had moved from familiar analogue practice to the first fully digital design department. To return to the script, much of the world building we engaged in provided narrative opportunities, propelled story, and became embedded in the final film. Voice and face recognition, internet of things, flexible graphic surfaces, driverless cars, non­lethal weaponry, bio­mimicry, gesture recognition led to sequences like the vertical car chase, the lead character exposed through directed consumer advertising in a mall, and the detective work amidst the gesture control of visual clues being transmitted by the precogs, would not have existed in the film without the world building we engaged in. We saw proof of concept not only in narrative design and production practice, but in the implementation of the design into the fiction of the film, which suggested exactly how and why immersive and interactive gesture control, facial recognition, internet of things, driverless cars might work in the world, and saw those fictions become reality. For the past 15 years, one prediction after another in the film have come true, artifacts continue to appear in the world that were presented as design fiction in the film, not because we were so clever but because we were curious about the possibilities of this world. Our design practice involved observation and extrapolation based on the factual research we engaged in. We surrounded ourselves with expert partners, collaborated and listened well, and did deep research that enriched the reality of our fictional worldspace. Tom Cruise in Minority Report interacts with the future of detection through a fictional technology that is a design fiction for a new gesture system that within three years will have provoked a mirrored existence in the real world. Previsualization

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