Gotta hand it to the FBI. Take their proposal of a completely custom system build that would circumvent various protections that are designed to keep people away from your information, and consider it on purely technical matters. It’s simple to explain to technical people, and it’s simple to explain to people that are not that well-versed in technology.

But consider this. There is no such thing as a safe-guarded backdoor. Do you really believe that once one government agency gets their hands on such a system build, it will only be used to help the “good guys”? If you are, I’d love to live in the fantasy world you’re inhabiting.

In the real world that the rest of us live in, this will be nothing short of a disaster. This custom build will get shared between various government agencies and branches, with an absolute guarantee of two things happening. First, it will get to an agency that is solely overseen by secret courts that rubberstamp pretty much every request. Second, it will get into the hands of general public, sooner rather than later – through social-engineered hacking or another Snowden-like act of political activism.

And then there’s another absolute guarantee. Let’s for a minute say that if you’re a law-abiding US citizen, then the US government is good guys. Then there are other governments who are our allies, which makes them good guys by proxy, and there are other governments which are our enemies which makes them bad guys.

What is going to stop other governments from demanding access to the same special system build? How many countries can a multi-national corporation withdraw their business from before it has no more places to do business in? How do you as a supporter of lawful information “extraction” decide on which laws you agree with and which step over “the line” that separates the good guys from the bad guys?

There’s not a single line in Tim Cook’s letter that is a gratuitous exaggeration of the dangers that lie ahead. I’ve spent the first twenty years of my life living in the communist USSR, where it was pretty safe to assume that the state had the capabilities and the means to do mass surveillance of anybody and everybody.

How does the self-aggrandizing beacon of democracy turn into the omnipresent surveillance state? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly (in the mighty words of Ernest Hemingway). Just don’t tell your kids that you didn’t see it coming.

In the last few years you’ve seen his work on futuristic user interfaces in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”, “Pacific Rim” and “Total Recall”. Last summer you’ve seen his true-to-the-metal work on the low-level interfaces in the first season of “Mr Robot”. And his work is currently on display in the first season of SyFy’s “The Expanse”, ranging from the medical and transportation interfaces of Ceres, to the navigation interfaces of the various spaceships, to the transparent blocks of glass that pervade all inhabited worlds of the show. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Timothy Peel of the Junction Box design studio to the ongoing series of interviews on fantasy user interfaces.

In this interview Timothy talks about the wide variety of feature and episodic productions that he’s been working on since the early 2000s, the increasing presence of screens in those productions in the last decade, the difference between impressing and convincing viewers, the overall evolution in the world of episodic television in general and the more specific changes in the quantity and the quality of screen interfaces in it, the world of narrative interface design that supports the story and the plot, and his views on design in general. In between he delves deeper into the almost-invisible screens of “Jessica Jones” and “Mr Robot” that stay true to the nature of the shows, the extravagantly complex interfaces of “Pacific Rim”, and the vast screen universe of “The Expanse” that spans multiple worlds, spaceships and types of interactions.

Screen graphics on “The Expanse”. Courtesy of Timothy Peel.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and your path so far.

Timothy: I come from a whole family of designers. My father is an architect and my mother is a designer, a teacher and a painter. I lived in a designed environment my whole life. It was this very beautiful bubble that, of course, would burst many times.

I was always interested in visual arts, specifically graphic design; I’ve always loved graphics even from a very young age.

I went to an arts high school where I was exposed to painting, life drawing, sculpture, and pottery – very much traditional art forms. And then in the early 90s at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), I was introduced to web design, a sort of new revolution, a new economy, a new way of doing things. It was this whole idea of interactivity. After OCA, I started doing very preliminary web design as the internet bandwidth improved. Illustrator and, Photoshop were pretty new. They were radical new tools that changed the way we thought about design.

At the same time I did some temporary summer jobs working in the movie business. Primarily it was building sets, making props and working with SFX. I did things like rig explosives on Johnny Mnemonic and install squibs into the walls for Robocop the TV series. I started to notice some of the drawings and graphics coming from the art department and they seemed like something that I could do. I went back to university and majored in interactive design with a minor in film. I returned to the film industry where I eventually became a senior graphic designer. I have been working steadily ever since.

I was being asked to do a lot of playback and interface design. Back in the late 90s they didn’t really have someone specifically for that job so it usually fell to the graphic designer. It’s still kind of a new job, even though more and more there are times when a film’s major narrative points are being told through a screen or a phone or some kind of user interface.

Over time, I ended up doing more interface design than graphic design and I started to really prefer it. Graphic design is still a primary part of UI/UX but now there’s interactivity, animation, visual effects (VFX), 3D rendering. It’s become a huge task to evolve along with it.

Screen graphics on “Total Recall”. Courtesy of Timothy Peel.

Kirill: How would you describe the evolution of the tools that you’ve been using since you’ve started doing user interfaces? Are they becoming more powerful and easy to use, just as you have more demand for evermore elaborate interfaces?

Timothy: The tools are evolving very quickly, and not always at the same rate. Illustrator and Photoshop are well integrated with After Effects. Cinema4D has some nice plugins that work directly with After Effects now. I switch back and forth between all these design suites as it becomes more efficient, but all that efficiency leads to more complexity and more ambition.

Kirill: You mentioned scripts relying heavily on using phones, tablets, monitors or even whole tables as screens. Was there any specific point in time for you where this became very prevalent, or perhaps it was just a gradual progression over the years?

Timothy: It made a pretty serious jump around 2003-2004. I worked on the remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2003. You have these survivors locked up in a mall as the whole world goes to hell with zombies surrounding them. They watch the end of the world on this vast array of televisions in a fake Panasonic TV store.

Panasonic was actually considering having stores like Sony does, and they came to do a “concept store” with us. We developed all these different news stations as pre-recorded footage. This wasn’t VFX, it was played back live on-set. This is where most of my early experience happened with motion graphics, UI/UX. It was the first time my screen-based content was a very big part of a scene, much more so than before. This had been done on many movies before Dawn of the Dead, but for me personally, the jump was around then.

A few weeks later, I had to make a couple of screens appear to be real touchscreens even before we had real ones that could work on set. We had an operator affect the screen as the actor touched it. It’s funny because all we do is interactive screens now. That was a different time.

Screen graphics on “Total Recall”. Courtesy of Timothy Peel.

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“The Martian” has been one of the major events in the sci-fi genre in 2015, featuring an amazing variety of user interfaces that cover a spectrum of screen sizes, purposes, and interaction patterns. If you’ve been following the ongoing series of interviews on fantasy user interfaces on this site, the name of David Sheldon-Hicks of Territory Studio is not new to you. In 2014 we spoke about the work the studio did for “Prometheus” and “Guardians of the Galaxy”, and last year David talked about Territory’s work on “Ex Machina”, “Jupiter Ascending” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron”.

Now it’s time for the screens of “The Martian”, and there’s no better person to talk about them than Marti Romances who, over the course of 7 months, has created more than 400 different screens for this film. In this back-and-forth between Marti and David they talk about the immense scale of the production, the endless discussions they’ve had with lead engineers at NASA to create interfaces that stay true to their real-life counterparts, and designing screens for the intended purpose – from the small monitors attached to the spacesuit sleeves to the gigantic 9×3 meter screens in NASA mission control center.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and your path so far.

Marti: I started in multimedia design as a motion graphics artist when I was 19. That was back in Barcelona, where I’m originally from. I spent four years working on motion graphics for TV advertising and DVD interfaces.  Those DVD menus were my first exposure to user interface design.

After that I got a call from Activision here in UK. They wanted a motion graphics artist who had never worked in video games to give them new and fresh ideas on the game they were developing at the time – DJ Hero 3. Mainly I was creating interfaces again – the menus for the game, transitions between screens, the HUD etc. Without knowing it, I was getting deeper into user interfaces.

After a couple of projects with Activision, Nintendo called. They offered a position of the art director for their new game on the new Wii U platform. It was very interesting because it involved a touch screen and the emerging new technology at that time. “Sing Party” was fun and completely different from what I was doing before. I think that when you apply your skills to new industries and new challenges, you learn a lot.

It was at this point that Territory was looking for an art director, and I was ready for new challenges. It was a very small studio when I arrived, around five people, and it was exactly what I was looking for.

Still of a screen on “Hermes”. Courtesy of 20th Century Fox and Territory Studio.

David: When Marti joined, Prometheus was out and we were working on Zero Dark Thirty. It was really early days in terms of our reputation in film graphics, and we were better known for our work in games.

Marti: And that’s what attracted me to Territory. Having come from TV advertising and video games, I was excited that at Territory both of these worlds were colliding. And on top of that I fell in love with Prometheus. My first projects here were Killzone ‘Mercenary’ and designing UI front-end for the new Xbox One that was in development at Microsoft.

After a couple of months I started on a short sci-fi film “Ellipse”, designing conceptual planetary systems. And then I started on “Guardians of the Galaxy” as my main first film. I went on to work on “Ex Machina”, “Jupiter Ascending”, “Avengers” and “The Martian”, with more in the pipeline.

Kirill: If I can bring you back to the user interface work you did for games, I’d imagine that those had to be very functional for people to interact with all the time. And on the other hand, the interfaces we see in movies are there on the screen, but they are not for me as a viewer to interact with. You might have the actors touching a few areas here and there, but overall they feel a bit less real if I may use that word. How different was it for you to transition into designing UIs for feature films?

Marti: Interface design for video games has to be pragmatic and you have to approach the work with ‘use’ in mind. So, you have to be very precise on core information that’s relevant to the game play at any one time – everything from what visual field do we have to work with, to how big a button can be and how big a number in the HUD is so that without looking you know how many grenades you have left. They do a lot of retina tests on everything. I think that background helped me a lot.

Designing film screens is very different. In “Guardians of the Galaxy”, we worked with fictional technology that no one has seen before, and there’s nothing that you can look at in terms of how you interact with it. The production designer was happy for us to open up the approach and let us imagine that maybe the characters were not touching anything and instead used mindwaves or whatever. It was a fun project and I had to be very open-minded. And it was interesting not to be attached to any technology.

On “The Martian” we worked with real-world technology, and I was thinking all of the time about how the characters would interact with the UI, how a button should look like on a touch-screen when they interact with it while they’re wearing gloves. There was a lot of thought and research behind what we did to make sure that everything looked absolutely credible.

Still of an arm screen on a spacesuit. Courtesy of Giles Keyte.

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Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it gives me great pleasure to welcome Niamh Coulter. In the last few years she worked as the set decorator on feature films such as “Easy Virtue” (read interview with the film’s art director), “Inkheart”, “Dorian Grey”, “Good People” and, most recently, “Before I Go To Sleep” and “Far From The Madding Crowd”. In this interview Niamh talks about the art and craft of set decoration and its interaction with the rest of the art department, the importance of surrounding actors with physical objects on set, what happens for her during the various production phases, and what stays with her after a production is done. In addition, Niamh takes us on a deeper dive into the details of her two most recent feature productions, “Before I Go To Sleep” and “Far From The Madding Crowd”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and your path so far.

Niamh: My name is Niamh Coulter and I am a set decorator, based in London and working in feature film and commercials. I have been in the industry now for over 20 years. It was a very fortunate set of circumstances that brought me here though really it seems like the path was preordained.

I studied History of Art and English at university and followed that for a time working as a fine art journalist.  I ended up traveling extensively in the far east and ultimately living in Indonesia where I worked for an English newspaper in Jakarta for a time. During my time in Jakarta I helped out a photographer friend and started styling shoots for him during the day and working the paper at night.

When I eventually returned to the UK an old school friend got me into the commercials end of the industry and introduced me to a designer and decorator whom I very quickly began working for full time. Commercials is an excellent ‘in’ into film I think, or it certainly was, as we worked with very high production values and very extreme deadlines so the art of making the impossible happen is what we lived and breathed. As it turns out History of Art is an excellent foundation for set decorating – it gives you a great knowledge of period, color and composition and an excellent visual recall.

A few years in I met the designer John Beard, with whom I have now collaborated for over 18 years, and he took me into my first feature which was a Chris Menges film called ‘The Lost Son’. Everything since then I have learned on the shop floor and every job teaches me something new. It’s one of the things I love most about the film industry.

On the sets of “Before I Go To Sleep”. Courtesy of Niamh Coulter.

Kirill: What drew you into the industry? If you go back to the time when you just started on your first production and some of the expectations that you had, how close or far has the reality of working in the industry turned out to be?

Niamh: When I got my first glimpse into the industry I was totally hooked, I couldn’t believe that the idea of working in the industry hadn’t either occurred or been suggested to me as it was such a perfect fit for me and my skill set but I guess that I had been concentrating on fine art and writing. I think by the time I did my first feature I had been doing it long enough in commercials for that there were not too many surprises.

The one thing that constantly surprises and disappoints me as I get older is still the inequality between the sexes in film and how patriarchal the industry fundamentally still is and the pay gap that exists above and below the line between the sexes. Also given the freelance nature of all our contracts there is never adequate HR support in film and I think a lot of people get treated unfairly as a result.

Kirill: Was it a bit disappointing to peek behind the “magic” of the cinema and see how those things are actually done?

Niamh: No never, it just made me enjoy it all the more.

On the sets of “Before I Go To Sleep”. Courtesy of Niamh Coulter.

Kirill: You meet a new person at a party. What’s your 10-second description of what you do for living?

Niamh: I am responsible for everything you see in frame that is not an actor! Everything from the glasses on the table to the paintings on the walls to the curtains at the windows and all the things that tell you who the character is by the things that they surround themselves with.

Kirill: What’s your role in the overall structure of the art department? I’m looking at the list of nominees for the Oscar awards for production design, and it’s always the team of the production designer and the set decorator. What makes this relationship so special?

Niamh: My role within the structure of the art department is beneath the Production Designer and on parity with the supervising art director. The relationship of the production designer and set decorator is a very special one as, when it works, you are totally in sync with your vision of how the film will look. I am very lucky in that with John (Beard) and Kave (Quinn) we have worked together so long that we have a great shorthand and they both trust me implicitly to manage my team and get on with what I do so that they can worry about the bigger picture.

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