Screen graphics for "Alien: Earth" by Modern Motion.

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews on fantasy user interfaces, it’s my pleasure to welcome Dave Henri and Stefan Grimm. Dave founded Modern Motion Pictures back in 2009 to provide services to design and present screen graphics for film and TV. Some of the company’s more recent work includes “First Man”, “For All Mankind” and “The Morning Show”. Stefan first joined the industry to work on “Powerless”, and later on “Constellation” after he joined Modern Motion as a partner. In this interview Dave and Stefan talk about their work on the just released “Alien: Earth”, going back to the original aesthetic of the first “Alien” movie and expanding it to the bigger storytelling universe of the show.

Left – Stefan Grimm, right – Dave Henri.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Dave: I’m Dave Henri, and I founded the company Modern Motion Pictures in Los Angeles in 2009. At the time it was a one-man operation to create screen graphics for use on set. I was an on-set operator and an engineer for a few years, and during that time I’d done an occasional graphic here and there, and I realized I needed a way to bill for it. The company took off, and I started doing a lot of my own shows – doing design and technical on-set work together. A few years into it we brought on our first partner Chris Cundey, and a few years after that the third partner Matt Brucell. By that time we’d been working quite a bit with Stefan. The first show we worked on together with him was “Powerless” set in the DC cinematic universe. A few years ago right after Covid we set up a German LLC / GmbH to handle European productions, and we brought Stefan on as a partner.

That’s the brief history of it, and as for why we do it – it’s just so much fun. You start with a blank screen, and a few hours later you have a moving graphic that’s going to be photographed and used on set – it’s amazing.

Stefan: I started in early 2000s as a web designer. Over time it kept on getting bigger, and grew from a one-man show to a small agency. When the first “Iron Man” came out in 2008, I looked at the Tony Stark’s helmet interfaces and started thinking about how those can be achieved. I was using mostly Flash in the beginning, but it was already starting to phase out at the time and I switched to After Effects.

As I continued doing web design, I also felt like I needed to play around with FUI [fictional user interfaces]. At that point I wasn’t aware that there was a term for it, and it was hard to search for references online. I was experimenting with trying to achieve the holographic looks inspired by Tony Stark’s helmet. A bit later in 2016 I made a small animation that counted from 0 to 100, and uploaded it on Behance. That’s when Dave appeared in my inbox and asked me if I’d be interested in doing graphics for TV shows.

It felt unreal. I come from a small city in Germany, and I considered myself to be lucky to be doing web design. I never had any thoughts about working in the movie industry. We had our first phone conversation, and I was really excited. But my first reaction was to refuse it, because I didn’t know anything about this industry. I did ask Dave to send over some examples he had in mind for “Powerless”, and I gave myself a weekend to revise those designs to be more aligned with my design approach. When it was done, I sent him a huge email, detailing all the changes and why I made them, and that’s how I ended up on that show. Those were my first baby steps into this industry, and I’m still enjoying being a part of it.

Screen graphics for “Powerless”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: There are so many screens in our lives today, and they do find their way into the movies and TV shows. There’s not a lot of screen estate on phones, but they are so deeply integrated into everything we do every day. Do you have a preference on the size of the screen you enjoy designing for?

Dave: As a company of designers and programmers, we’re building a lot for phones for the moment. We developed a proprietary software called Magic Phone that perfectly emulates either an iPhone or an Android, and it’s quickly becoming an industry standard. We use it for all of our shows, and also license it out to other developers and designers. It does everything from phone calls to texting to social media browsing and more.

Like you’re saying, phones are everywhere. It’s become an increasingly important part of telling a story in modern day. You just can’t ignore phones. Characters are texting each other, whether it’s a romance or a spy thriller. We also do shows with big screens in big rooms. “For All Mankind” has had multiple mission control sets throughout its five seasons. “The Morning Show” has the studio set, as well as the control room. We also did Mission Control on “First Man”.

I personally like the bigger, more out there stuff. It’s a little more exciting to be working on. But it’s also nice to be able to bring the reality of a phone call or a text, to fulfill something that is critical to a story and to make it look accurate. It’s getting a lot better, not just with our software but with other people’s work. A few years ago, if a character got a text from his wife, it was the only text in the thread. We did a big push with productions to give us the previous texts in their history. We might not see them text back and forth, but there has to be something there on the screen. It’s an interesting part to be striving for that realism.

Stefan: For me it’s definitely the big screens. My favorite sets are the ones where big screens and small screens are stitched together in a rig so you can play around with different sizes of graphics. I love mission control sets, and I’ve done a lot of those in the last two years [laughs]. Phone graphics are more tied to reality, because people use their smartphones every day. They know how it should look and how it responds to your inputs. – while a mission control set can be something more of a fiction. That’s why I have a bit more freedom to play around.

Screen graphics for “Powerless”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: How do you see the evolution of the software tools, and how much anxiety is there about obsolescence and not being able to open older files on newer hardware?

Stefan: I haven’t struggled with different file formats so far. I rely on the basic formats in After Effects and Cinema 4D for easier file exchange. When I design, I try to avoid expensive programs whenever possible. Setting yourself a boundary pushes you to be more creative within those boundaries. There’s nothing wrong with relying on Photoshop and After Effects, especially when you’re collaborating on them with other designers.

Dave: Going back to the software that we develop in house, we find that we have to fork it at a certain point to be able to use the new features of the latest phones or the latest laptops. Then we will maintain a legacy version for a period show that’s maybe set five years in the past. There’s so much change in developing for phones, and our in house programs that we built five years ago don’t run on a modern phone.

For the third party tools, we don’t run into much trouble. We are focused on the current Adobe suite, as well as on our own internal software. I’ve been doing this on set long enough. The deliverables used to be either Flash or, later on, Macromedia Director, and that’s just gone. If I want to go back and open some files from “Iron Man 3”, I’d have to dig up an old computer to run them.

Graphics setup with iPhones for LED readouts on “First Man”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: Do you have a preference to do work on set versus in post production? What are the pros and cons of both from your perspective?

Dave: I prefer doing it on set. Doing it for post-production tends to be a little more straightforward and a little easier in some ways, but I like the immediacy of doing it on set. You have the actual graphic there, you have something for the actors to react to – that’s a real thrill for me. But it can also mean a lot of late nights, especially for Stefan [laughs].

I remember 10-15 years having conversations with set PAs [production assistants], and they were telling me that they were interested in getting to do what we were doing. There was a period of time where my answer would be to make sure you really want this, because everything was going towards green screen on set. We had done a movie where it would have been so easy to do it practical, but everything was green screen. I was thinking back then that the job might be going away. Now cut to 15 years later, and phones are everywhere, and there’s so many screens in our lives, and it’s still cost-effective for a production to do it practically if they can. I also like that tactile immediacy that a working graphic on set gives to the actor, the cinematographer or the director.

Stefan: I enjoy creating the graphics for on set purposes, and I enjoy seeing the photos of how those graphics turn out. And I also enjoy working for post production, because it’s a bit more relaxing. There is less time pressure, especially when it comes to last minute changes for multiple screens. Working on on-set graphics often means dealing with last-minute changes, some of which need to be done overnight. That can really impact your personal life — it’s not unusual to cancel dinner plans or give up free time just to go back and make sure everything is ready for the shoot.

But for me it’s an absolute dream job.

Graphics setup with iPhones for LED readouts on “First Man”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: Getting to “Alien: Earth”, how did it start for you, and what conversations did you have about the overall style of the show?

Dave: I worked with the production designer Andy Nicholson on a previous project “Constellation”, and when he joined “Alien: Earth”, he recommended me for the job. I spoke with the producers and the director, and the interviews went well, and that’s how we got it.

When I had the initial conversations with the show creator Noah Hawley, he had a crystal clear vision of what he wanted. He very much wanted the retro futurism. He wanted to reflect the first original two movies. That was a great starting point for us.

We had two distinct looks that we needed to create. Everything for Maginot is directly related to the Nostromo. Stefan did faithful recreations of pretty much every graphic from the original film. Andy Nicholson and his team in the art department had been on the project for months by the time we started, and they had already pulled a lot of research. The second look was for Prodigy, and Noah and Andy together came up with its idea. It’s a different company, different interfaces, different looks – but still in the same universe. It wouldn’t make sense for Prodigy to be all these brilliantly colorful holograms, and Weyland-Yutani to be green text on the black screen.

Andy and the prop master Moritz Heinlin had come up with a design for the monitors of the Prodigy stuff where it was 16:9, while Yutani was 4:3 – so that right away is a visual cue. They also had this idea about the screens. They didn’t just want to say that Prodigy has LCD panels. They asked themselves – what is something that would have existed in the late ’70s and early ’80s that a futurist might imagine bigger, and they came up with the Sony Watchman. That had a prism which was angled, basically a very small CRT in a prism. So they decided to lose the whole base of that and make the screen much bigger. Now you have a screen set in a box at an angle, with a little forced perspective on it.

This forced us to write all new programs. We didn’t want to design with the perspective, so Stefan created everything as 16:9, and then we would angle it on set to fit within the beveled edges of the displays.

This was a lot of fun for everybody involved, because it was a chance to create something new from scratch. Stefan explored some ideas, and Andy Nicholson already had ideas on how the interfaces would move and interact. Instead of opening and closing windows, he wanted things to scroll either horizontally or vertically, but he did want layered information. Stefan did several different concepts early on, and then we quickly honed in on what the look was going to be.

Screen graphics of MOTHER on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Stefan: My journey started with a surprise. We were at the post-production for “Constellation”, and I was focused on that. I had a call with Dave, and I wasn’t aware that he was already talking with production about being a part of the Alien universe. When it came up on our call, it was completely out of the blue. We scheduled another call where Dave gave me a brief and a rough outline of what will be needed.

I had a lot of freedom to experiment. My research started with watching the first two “Alien” movies three times each. I paused the film every time a monitor appeared, and I took a photo with my phone, collecting all the files and timestamps as references.

The first thing I started working on was the MOTHER (MU/TH/UR) animation. It’s the most iconic element in my mind when it comes to the interfaces in Alien. It’s just text, but with that distinctive flash at the beginning as the line types out — something that’s burned into my memory. I was a little nervous at first because I hadn’t read the script yet. It’s an animation that types out a single line, but I didn’t know how many conversations (with Mother) the show eventually includes. So I recreated its original look while also building it in a flexible, dynamic way using After Effects expressions. It could generate text and animate it automatically, and you could easily add or remove lines if needed. That was my first major achievement.

Then I headed over to the Maginot screens, which were replications of the ones you can see on the Nostromo, following the research that was sent over by the production. It sucked me deep into that universe. Even though they are copies of existing screens, it was fun to work on them. Once the original graphics were recreated, I needed to extend the visual language by designing additional screens — such as those for the Maginot MedBay or the Data Library — while keeping them stylistically coherent with the rest.

Then I focused on the concepts for Prodigy. I drew similarities in how you would compare operating systems. The Maginot and Nostromo stuff from Weyland-Yutanu was more like MS DOS, while Prodigy was more like Windows 3.1. They are in the same universe, but one side is a little bit ahead when it comes to the visual language. Prodigy also took some visual elements from Weyland-Yutani, mainly the text glow animation from the MOTHER interactions. Some of the bars on the Prodigy screens have the same glow, but not as intense. I wanted to make it believable, to make it feel a part of that universe, while also sharing some elements and tying those things together to stay consistent.

There weren’t many revisions throughout the process. We sent in a couple of suggestions, and once they decided, we had the freedom to move on.

Screen graphics of the tracker interface on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: I love the opening shot of the show, with the helmet reflecting a bit of a scrolling text, which places me immediately in the opening shot of the original “Alien” – which was shot in the days of CRT monitors. How did you approach recreating the old CRT visuals on the more modern displays?

Dave: That was a big thing from Andy Nicholson the production designer. He threw down the gauntlet and told us to not build it at HD. He wanted us to build it as standard definition. Prodigy is 720, and there were a couple of cases where, with his permission, we did bump it to 1920. But most of the things that we built were low resolution on purpose.

On the Maginot set of the communications room with MOTHER, those are actually CRTs, and we had a mix of CRTs and flat panels throughout the rest of the sets, with those flat panels disguised to look like CRTs. Stefan put a lot of time and effort into recreating the glow, the scan lines and the slight warp of a CRT.

Stefan: I grew up with CRTs. My first approach was to break my graphics down into a dot matrix to split the RGB channels and mimic the basic characteristics of a CRT monitor. We later decided to skip this and went with classic scan lines instead, as the dot matrix significantly slowed down the process — especially when outputting dozens of graphics at once.

What we did keep was a reduced frame rate, so the animations don’t appear as smooth as modern ones. We also slightly bulged the graphics, added some chromatic aberration, and introduced a bit of flickering.

Screen graphics of the tracker interface on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: My favorite screen is from one of the stations on Maginot that showed a text-based interface that looked like Norton Commander – two panels side by side, with a horizontal menu bar at the bottom, going from F1 to F10 for quick commands. That brought me right back to the early ’90s and the DOS interfaces of that era. How fun was it to dive back into the past to bring those text-based terminal interfaces back to life?

Stefan: It was a lot of fun. I came to this show right after “Constellation” which is set in the current time. And here on “Alien: Earth” we’re moving back into the past, dialing things down to the basic forms. Norton Commander is exactly what was my starting point on this.

Dave: My first computer was a TI-34a, and we didn’t have proper BIOS on that. You can draw a lot of references from that era, like Apple IIe and others. That era definitely lent the vocabulary to what we ended up creating. We did a lot of cool stuff on the show, but one of my favorite graphics is the Prodigy screensaver. It’s just the logo bouncing, and it’s got a trail behind it that just feels so retro accurate. When I saw that the first time, I flipped for it.

Screen graphics of the Prodigy screensaver on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

You said earlier that your favorite was that opening shot of the reflection in the helmet. Early on in pre-production, when Stefan was recreating all the various screens, he put together a reel of the Maginot boot up sequence directly below the Nostromo boot up sequence. He left in all the audio from the original film, and everything else, and every person that I showed that to – from Noah to Andy to everybody else – that just flipped for it. Everybody was so excited about how accurate it was.

Andy Nicholson did a video with a walk through the sets, and he talks about how that set is built to millimeter accuracy to the Nostromo bridge. Of course, we were taking creative license where we needed to for our story, and you bring that together for the graphics. You start with the Nostromo, and you build the library for Maginot, which ended up being around twice as many graphics as were seen on screen in the original movie.

Behind the scenes of the Tech Lab set on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: I’m not sure if it would be considered a trade secret. Are there any Easter eggs you planted into the screens?

Dave: [laughs] I’ll only go as far as to say – yes, there are Easter eggs. There’s nothing major. I think all graphic artists put these little Easter eggs, like little phrases or initials or numbers that mean something personal. There are no story Easter eggs in it.

Stefan: I put our initials in a few places. You can spot DH [Dave Henri], CC [Chris Cundey], MB [Matt Brucell] and SG [Stefan Grimm] in there [laughs].

Kirill: Were there any particular colors that the production wanted you to stay away from for the interfaces?

Stefan: The original graphics for the cryosleep capsules were monochromatic, but as things progressed, we did add some orange color in there.

Dave: We tried to keep it relatively muted, but as Stefan is saying, we ended up introducing color in there, even more on Prodigy than on Maginot. We did try to stay away from reds, oranges and yellows for the most part.

On the sets of “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: Stepping away from “Alien: Earth”, what’s your favorite color to work with?

Stefan: When it comes to futuristic graphics, my favorite color is a dark greenish tone with a little touch of blue in it that is called “petrol” in German. I use it as a base for some experimental designs on Instagram that I do for fun. With an orange accent as the highlight color — that’s my favorite combination.

Dave: My personal favorites are blue and green. And when it comes to graphics on screen, it’s about what’s going to tell the story correctly, what’s going to evoke the proper emotion, and what’s also going to pop on the screen when it’s supposed to pop, or what’s going to blend in. If you work on an animation that is displayed in the background, it should have just a little bit of life to it. If it’s blinking too much or too much popping of one color, that’s distracting you away from what the hero character in the foreground is doing. You’re competing with the story rather than adding to it. I also like a combination of silvery white and orange for technical things.

Stefan: Going back to my first job on “Powerless”, my suggestion was to go primarily with orange. There was never a discussion of picking another color that’s more muted. Dave told me a little bit about the show on our first call, and when I learned that it was a comedy with superheroes, it was clear that it had to be orange. There wasn’t any discussion to pick another color. It depends on the story.

Screen graphics for Maginot on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: Outside of “Alien: Earth”, what would be your favorite production so far that you’ve worked on?

Stefan: For me it was “Constellation”. It was the first show that we had after I joined the company as a partner, and I was proud that we got that show. It’s a sci-fi with two universes, and I love these stories. It was also my first show where I was on set, and it was impressive. It was a lot of work to do, and it was fun from the beginning to the end.

Dave: If we’re strictly talking about graphics, for me it’s “For All Mankind” and “First Man”. Recreating the look of those original mission control sets was really fun. On “First Man” we did all the LED instrument clusters of the command module by taping some iPhones and iPads to the back of the set to recreate that authentic glowing look, much like we did for the CRTs on “Alien: Earth”.

Screen graphics for Maginot on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: Between being the existential threat to human creativity and getting this amazing new tool, how do you see generative AI these days?

Dave: It’s definitely something that we’re keeping an eye on. It’s not a tool that we use today, and in fact every production that I’ve worked on so far strictly forbids it. That’s down to the legal minefields of how generative AI is learning, as well as the various union agreements. Like anything else, it’s likely to evolve into a useful tool, but we have to be careful about it and see where it goes. Just a few days ago the head of DC said that they’ll never use generative AI as long as he’s in charge of the company.

Human creativity is what we’re all about, and that’s incredibly important. Will small things in AI definitely help things out? For sure. You can see how easy it is now to erase something in Photoshop or After Effects. I see that as evolving into a very useful tool. It’s still a little bit crude for production use right now, but it’s going to get there. In terms of where it’s going five years from now, it’s impossible to say – but hopefully humans are still very much involved.

Screen graphics for Wendy’s test on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Stefan: Same for me. I haven’t integrated AI into my workflow yet, and as Dave said, I’m definitely watching how things evolve. I’m not going to lie. I’m impressed with how things are improving with video generation with Sora 2 and Veo 3.

My job is to be creative, to understand the story, and to design all the screens that are needed for the set. I fear that if somebody relies on AI to do these things, they can’t ensure the quality and consistency of the output.

When I learned Photoshop and After Effects, I tried it to learn it the hard way. Doing rotoscoping in After Effects is no fun, but you have to know how it is done. And then, once you know all the basics, then you can experiment with plugins, and maybe later with AI. But from my perspective, you need to have the skills to do it by hand.

Creativity is a process. If you ask a generative AI to design a user interface, maybe it ends up looking cool, but you didn’t get a chance to go through the process, and maybe to make some mistakes, and to learn from those mistakes and turn them into something great later on. When you’re using AI, you take away all of those steps where you can learn and grow. You don’t know what it’s doing, and why it’s doing it.

Screen graphics for Wendy’s test on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

Kirill: Knowing what you know today after having been in the industry for a while, if you had a time machine and you could go back in time and talk to the young Stefan and young Dave, what kind of advice would you give to your younger self?

Stefan: My advice to myself would be to learn After Effects sooner [laughs].

Dave: That’s a good one. More generally, I’d tell myself to appreciate going with the flow. I used to work with a producer who would say that “this is a business of change.” That can refer to the call sheet that is going to change for tomorrow, and that can be the software that you’re using isn’t going to exist two years from now. Embrace the change instead of trying to fight it. And enjoy yourself, because making movies and TV shows is so much fun.

Screen graphics on a handheld device on “Alien: Earth”, courtesy of Modern Motion.

And here I’d like to thank Dave Henri and Stefan Grimm for taking the time out of their busy schedule to talk with me about the art and craft of screen graphics, and for sharing the supporting materials for the interview. You can also find Stefan on Instagram, Behance, LinkedIn, and Dribbble. “Alien: Earth” is out now on FX. And if you’re interested to read additional interviews about the wonderful world of screen graphics and user interfaces for film and TV, click here for more..