Make a list of your top favorite tentpole productions in the past 15 years, and you can count on having François Audouy be part of at least one of them. He started his career as an illustrator and concept artist on movies such as Men In Black, Pearl Harbor, Spider-Man, Minority Report and Avatar, shifted to the art director position on Transformers, Watchmen and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and then moved to be the production designer or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and the recently released The Wolverine. In this interview François talks about his work on The Wolverine that brought him back to his days of reading comics books growing up, researching the history, art and architecture of Japan, designing and building the main sets for the movie, and collaborating with visual effects departments on big-budget sci-fi productions.
François AudouyKirill: Please tell us about what you’ve been doing lately.
François: I was the production designer on Wolverine, which was an incredibly exciting and rewarding project. It took seventeen months to complete from start to finish. And I just finished another movie, Dracula Untold, and I’m very excited about Wolverine coming out on DVD.
Kirill: How far did you get into the X-Men universe preparing for the movie? Did you treat this movie as a standalone production not necessarily connected to the rest of the franchise?
François: When I first heard about the project, the only thing I knew about it was that it was set in Japan. And to be honest, that was the thing I was the most excited about. It was a dream of mine to design a movie set in Japan. Every movie is an opportunity for a designer to become an expert in something. So I really thought it was exciting to learn more about Japanese culture and architecture. You’re always looking for an opportunity to learn something.
Having said that, I was also really aware of Wolverine because I was born in 1970s, and I’m pretty much the same age as Wolverine. I remember the comic books from the late 1980s, which, looking back, is probably the golden age of Wolverine. My feeling was that the movies featuring Wolverine hadn’t really tapped into a lot of what I loved about those comics, and a lot of detail with the Logan character who’s so interesting. And I read the script, I thought that it was a great story where we really get a chance to get to know Wolverine a little bit better, and we get to focus on him for an entire movie without the distractions of all the tertiary characters. That was very exciting.
Yashida cottage. Concept illustration over location photography. Courtesy of François Audouy.
Kirill: The Japanese culture is rather closed to the outsiders. How did you approach your research phase?
François: It was kind of terrifying in the beginning, honestly. It’s so different, and so deep. There’s so much to learn.
First thing I did was to hire a researcher in Los Angeles to pull images and references. And Jim [Mangold, director] early on decided that he wasn’t interested in making a movie with cliches, like little temples or bamboo forests. I went hunting for settings and places that felt unique and different. One thing that I’m really proud of in the film is that we have this intimate story, but it also takes them through places that are understated, grounded in real, and not so Hollywood-phony [laughs]. I was trying to do something that felt real.
What helped tremendously was that I had the art department in Tokyo, and a group of people who were helping me with the locations. I had a great location manager. I scouted many places in Japan, in the mountains, north of Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka. I went there six times, and over the course of the travels every time I learned more about the culture, as I was surrounded by my Japanese crew going to all these interesting places.
Left – Tokyo love hotel, set built on stage. Right – ice village, set built on location. Courtesy of François Audouy.
Kirill: The family compound is one of the central sets in the movie. How much time did you spend on it?
François: That was probably our biggest set, and it was my favorite. It was a very immersive set, a set that you walk into and it feels totally real, even though it was built on a soundstage. Jim was referencing and inspired by “Rear Window” with Jimmy Stewart. It had an apartment looking out into the courtyard, and you can see the world outside and all of the different stories happening. And he wanted the Yashida compound to have the same feel, where you could look and have these views across the central courtyard, and see Mariko’s world, and Yashida’s chambers, and the story dynamic of this complicated family.
I created a set that was pretty much in-camera. We had a big central courtyard with water element, and all of the interiors, and it was very much an in-camera place. And it was a very hyper-modern Japanese aesthetic that was ground and rooted in the ancient flow of Japanese architecture.
And to answer your question, it probably took five or six months to design that.
Yashida compound. Set built on stage. Courtesy of François Audouy.
Kirill: And the other big set for the final sequence in the science lab was done with some digital extensions?
François: It was originally scripted as a cave [laughs]. But I wanted to bring it back to a more Japanese setting. The movie has a little bit of everything – an old cottage, a billionaire’s compound, an ancient Buddhist temple in Tokyo – and I thought it would be really cool to have a modern industrial lab.
This set was pretty big, 42 feet tall. We built two floors of the tower that was supposed to be 30-40 stories high. The idea was to create an action sequence that happened vertically. Normally these sequences are very horizontal, and we wanted to go down and up instead of just horizontal. We kept redressing our two floors as different floors going down, and extending those floors with the digital set extensions.
Yashida lab. Set built on stage. Courtesy of François Audouy.
Kirill: You’ve worked on quite a few other VFX-heavy productions. How is the balance of responsibilities between you as the production designer and the visual effects supervisor working for you? Are you losing some of the control over the final look of the digitally augmented scenes?
François: You’re right, as a lot of these films are becoming more synthetic, relying on digital set extensions and digital building out of environments. The studios and the directors realize that too, which is why we bring in the visual effects supervisors quite early in pre-production, so that they can be involved in what we’re doing. I try to keep a very close collaboration with VFX supervisors, and I also try to make sure that I design the digital sets – or sets with digital extensions – in the same way that I’m designing a set I’m building. I don’t really see a distinction whether it’s going to be digital or physical. It doesn’t matter to the audience. They don’t know and they don’t care what’s digital or what’s physical. I really treat that job in the same way.
I work hard to have everything designed and figured out before I leave the production. We hand over all the assets to visual effects for the assembly in the same way that I would hand over designs to a construction crew. They would get a full set of construction drawings, paint references and color ways, with everything figured out before you go and build the set.
Kirill: Although the difference is that for physical construction you’re still on the project, but for digital in post-production you are, for the most part, gone.
François: That’s true, and that’s why it’s important to have a close relationship with the visual effect supervisor which will be overseeing the final construction of the digital assets.
One thing that was great about Wolverine was that Jim had me come by the editing suite at Fox every two weeks over the course of six months. He showed me new things every two weeks, and it was a really great opportunity. He pulled me in, valued my opinion and kept me as a part of the team.
Kirill: And the last question is about 3D productions. How is it working out for you. Is it here to stay, perhaps confined to the tentpole sci-fi productions, or do you see it fading away?
François: I think stereo’s here to stay. I like it, but I don’t like it for all films [laughs]. It can be a great added experience to certain films, and kind of a distraction to others. It’s here to stay, but I don’t think we’ll be doing all films in stereo.
And here I’d like to thank François Audouy for taking the time out of his schedule to answer a few questions I had about his work on The Wolverine and about his craft in general. Special thanks to Mitzye Ramos at Think Jam for putting me in touch with François. The movie is available on DVD, Blu-Ray and in your favorite digital distribution channels.
Continuing a series of interviews with designers and artists that bring user interfaces and graphics to the big screens, it’s my pleasure to host Paul Beaudry. You have seen his work on “Avatar”, “The Hunger Games” and “Ender’s Game”, and in this interview Paul talks about what goes into designing screen graphics, drawing inspiration from the latest explorations in real-world software and hardware, holographic and 3D displays as a possible evolution of human-computer interaction in the next few decades, challenges in using technologies such as Google Glass or Siri in film, the ongoing push to create more detailed and elaborate sequences, and his thoughts on working remotely with the current crop of collaboration tools.
Kirill: Tell us about how you started in the field of motion graphics.
Paul: I started out wanting to be an AVID editor, editing documentaries and similar productions. As soon as I finished school and got into the industry, I found out that what I liked the most was coming up with graphics for documentaries and shows that I ended up working on. From there I started teaching myself motion graphics, moving into opening title sequences and getting some cool opportunities.
There are really good communities online for learning. At the time for me it was talking with other people at the great mograph.net site, talking about how to get into the industry, the challenges and technical issues. That’s how I got my start. The software itself is not crazy, and a lot of people learn how to use, for example, Photoshop even though they’re not professional graphic designers or photographers. They way I look at After Effects and other 3D tools that we use is that they are more complex than Photoshop, but not so much so that it’s not impossible to learn on your own. It was years going crazy, huddled over my computer, teaching myself in every bit of free time I had during late nights, not having much of an outside life for sure [laughs].
Kirill: That’s on the technical side of things. What about the design side?
Paul: I hope I’m still learning as I go. It was a lot of the same, learning design and technical stuff together hand-in-hand. I think it’s important, actually. A lot of the conversations we had online was about getting critiques of your work, moving forward in design and technical side at the same time.
Kirill: How did you start building out your portfolio?
Paul: A whole bunch of spec pieces. My interest at the start was not really in UI design for film. At the time not that many people even knew that could be a full-time job. I was more on the television side of things, doing commercials, title sequences, more traditional motion graphics. And it was also doing my own stuff, building up reputation to get real projects.
Kirill: What were those first real projects?
Paul: I was working with the company Frantic Films on a half-hour documentary show for the Discovery channel. I don’t think it ran in US; it was a Canadian thing. I got a chance to do the opening title sequence for them, expressing my interest in doing that, and they gave me my first shot. From there I started doing a lot more work for them, and some stuff for HBO and A&E a few years later, and as a freelancer I kind of branched from there.
Kirill: What’s the story of the iOS music app Anthm that you have in the portfolio section on your site?
Paul: Anthm came out in February 2012, and actually the name is now Jukio because we ran into a bit of a legal issue. That’s something I did with my friends in our free time. It’s me, Tyler Johnston who is a graphic designer, and Ben Myers who I worked with on Avatar. We were having drinks at a bar, and we were annoyed at the music they were playing. So we came up with an app for iOS that lets you request and vote on the music playing in your location from your phone, like a jukebox with millions of songs.
Kirill: Perhaps jumping a bit forward, your work for movie UIs is the tip of the iceberg above the surface, with playback loops or basic interactivity that mostly focuses on the presentation layer. And on the other hand, creating a real application that people run on their devices forces you into the full design and implementation cycle, complete with crashes, bug fixes, feature requests etc.
Paul: My first passion is to create fantasy user interfaces for film, but at a certain point you want to make something that’s real, something that a real user can use. Something that doesn’t only look like magic, but hopefully feels magical to use. Not that Jukio is earth-changing or anything, it’s simply a music app, but there are small UX choices there that feel magical to us and that’s not always something you can do in film. It’s definitely something that we’re really interested in – getting real feedback from people, making something real that can be used to solve real-world problems.
I should mention that none films I can talk about right now had real software in them, everything that’s been released was done in post, but the company I’m working with now, G Creative Productions, has the ability to create real software that’s used on set by the actors while they’re filming. It’s all done using live playback so it’s not a post-production thing at all – they create real software that the actors can tap, change on the fly and really interact with while they’re filming.
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Riccardo Guasco is an illustrator and a painter working with a variety of styles and mediums – ink, watercolor, acrylic, Chinese brush – in addition to creating digital illustrations for clients such as Eni, Diesel, Rizzoli, Moleskine, Thames & Hudson and TBWA. In this interview Riccardo talks about what influenced his taste, not wanting to be tied to a single technique, and conveying motion in a static medium – particularly in his collection about cyclists.
Photography by Lorenzo De Simone
Kirill: Tell us about yourself and how you started in the field.
Riccardo: My name is Riccardo Guasco, I am an illustrator and a painter born in Alessandria, a small town in the northwestern part of Italy. I’ve always been drawing: since I was a little boy, I’ve always got the chance to attend art schools, till the School of Fine Arts in Turin. And this experience helped me to improve my hand and my style, up to turn my passion into a job.
Kirill: What informs and shapes your taste and style?
Riccardo: My style has evolved over time, matured with the passing of the years and with the settling down of my passions. During my studies, I got very interested into Picasso’s, Futurist painters’, Russian Suprematists’ and contemporary street art. Later, my passion has been enriched with comics – with the characters coming from Il Corriere dei Piccoli, the first Italian weekly comic magazine -, posters, or thanks to artists creating advertising placards since the Forties – such as Savignac, Cappiello, Seneca, Dudovich. It is a style taking inspiration from simple images, made up of few lines but full of expressive and emotional content.
Kirill: Your portfolio has work in multiple mediums – ink, watercolor, acrylic, Chinese brush. Is this a challenge to yourself to explore different directions and styles?
Riccardo: I love my art can become a language applicable to all media and through every technique. Technique is just a tool, a mean to communicate; the most important thing is having a message. I don’t want to tie myself down to a single technique or even worse to a single software, I want to try them all. My next collection I have in my mind, it will be a ceramic dinnerware set; this technique is really attractive to me, but I have never tried it up to now.
Kirill: What are your thoughts about digital illustration hardware and software tools?
Riccardo: I often use hardware and software tools in my job. Photoshop, Illustrator and Cintiq digital tablet are useful but not essential tools, luckily. As I told you before, I don’t want to tie myself down to a single software or a single hardware. Almost all my works arise from the paper first, and several times I prefer not to switch them into a digital format because I do not want to loose the freshness they have on the paper.
Kirill: How do you approach capturing and conveying movement in this static medium, particularly in your illustrations of cyclists?
Riccardo: My collection about cyclists was one of my earlier works. I wanted to convey the more introspective side of each cyclist, rather than to portray them just as racers; my attention was addressed to their thoughts and their soul, I wanted to tell something only through their profiles. So, I decided to eliminate the bicycle and everything that was redundant for me. And I was left with faces belonging to heroes, profiles speaking about struggle, noses stuck out in order to reach the finishing line they would have passed shortly.
Kirill: Do you ever find yourself so immersed during painting that you lose track of time?
Riccardo: If I could, I would draw nights and days, and if I am doing a job I like I don’t care about tiredness and time passing. I experience like a trance and my attention is completely enchanted by the work till the end. On the contrary, I never spend too much time on the same painting or illustration because I do not want to loose the freshness and spontaneity of the very first idea I’ve put on the paper.
Kirill: What goes through you head when you look at your own work from a few years ago?
Riccardo: It is a continuous metamorphosis, my works and my style change with the passing of the years (luckily). When I go back to my old works, I see naivety and defects that I would not make again now and I think the same painting or illustration would be different today.
Kirill: As you went back to the academic world, do you miss the more hectic side of client work? Any plans to go back to freelancing or agency?
Riccardo: I like to work with customers and/or agencies that ask me for unusual illustrations. I think that facing and dealing with brief and customer’s requirements is like a training. Usually, I try to explain to the customer that first of all we need to rely on each other and have a mutual consideration; only in this way it is possible to discuss and create an illustration satisfying both. I know I have a really peculiar and codified style, and this is a luck that helps me to meet customers who are exactly looking for my illustrations because they appreciate and consider them interesting from a quality point of view.
Kirill: What do you do when you run out of ideas and get stuck?
Riccardo: I think inspiration does not exist. Creativity and ideas are the result of a teamwork of eye, brain and hart. At the end of this process, the hand realizes what the other three players have imagined. This process cannot be stopped because it is like breathing or running: you need training and perseverance.
Kirill: What’s the best thing about being an illustrator?
Riccardo: The best thing about being an illustrator is the availability in your own hands of a universal communication medium: “drawing”. Having the opportunity to create an image able to reach and touch millions of people in a short time; if you try to think about an image, you realize it is more straightforward than a book, or a song, or rather a movie; but it has a strong tension inside that needs to be well and carefully handle.
And here I’d like to thank Riccardo Guasco for his outstanding work, and for taking the time to answer a few questions I had about his art and craft. You can find his work online at his main portfolio site and his Behance profile. Selected works are available for sale at his Society6 shop.
Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with illustrators, it is my pleasure to welcome the talented and prolific Morgan Schweitzer. He splits his time between editorial illustrations and motion work that includes character design, concept design, asset creation and storyboard art. His clients include Penguin, Businessweek, Maxim, Psyop, Buck, Stardust and many others. In this interview Morgan talks about his roots, his creative process and designing for various media.
Kirill: Tell us about yourself and how you started in the field.
Morgan: I studied Visual Communications at Washington University in St Louis. When I first graduated I blindly emailed over 100 commercial animation studios all over the world to see if they had openings. It was only one studio, Nathan Love in New York, that started offering me some freelance work here and there. I did some odd-jobs as a freelancer starting out. I was hired by a talented graphic designer/developer and family friend, Gretchen May. She was working for Massachusetts General Hospital at the time, and hired me to build an illustration library for them. Selling the copyrights to all the images allowed me the financial freedom to move to New York City. Once in NYC I started working for Nathan Love more regularly. In fact, the day they called me in to start was the same day I was supposed to start work as a waiter.
I dropped off my portfolio, sent out mailers and started getting some editorial illustration jobs. For about a year I illustrated a weekly column for the Village Voice. Meanwhile, as other freelance coworkers migrated to other studios, my name got spread around and I started working for more animation studios.
Wraparound cover for PK Pinkerton and the Deadly Desperados book published by Penguin.
Kirill: What informs and shapes your taste and style?
Morgan: I have a real compulsion to discover new artists, designers, and illustrators online. It’s inspiring and eye-opening to see how different artists work, and how they work differently from me.
Kirill: Is there a danger of absorbing too much from what influences you and not finding your own unique voice?
Morgan: There is certainly that danger. My influences are so vast, that I’m never influenced by one artist in particular. I strive to become an amalgam of everything that I love in all that influences me.
However, I struggled for a while…or rather, I thought I was struggling for a while with finding a focus and a voice. As a concept artist I work to invent new styles and aesthetics for each project. Some, styles that I would never pursue within my own artistic exploration. So, for a while I felt like concept art muddled my focus and my own voice. I got confused and thought I needed to stick to a “style” or come up with a “style” that was unique to me.
Then, I stepped back and realized that when given an illustration assignment I would go back to my own default and illustrate the topic in the way that was most comfortable for me. And, while I never equated that with a “style,” what I realized was that the most genuine artistic voices are not determined from a lineup of styles, but rather, just a way of working which is most comfortable and engaging for the artist. That said, I still don’t feel like I have a “style,” and I don’t anticipate ever feeling that way.
Illustration for an article in American Cowboy Magazine about the old Clint Eastwood classic, Fist Full of Dollars
Kirill: There’s a lot of momentum and energy in your illustrations. How do you approach conveying motion in a static image, particularly for human subjects?
Morgan: I’m glad that comes across. My sketches are generally very loose and gestural at first. I try to incorporate some of those gestural qualities to help guide the finished illustration and to exaggerate aspects of the figure that help convey movement.
Kirill: What is the process of designing a book cover? Is it about capturing the story in a single image, or a somewhat looser interpretation that gives you more freedom?
Morgan: For book covers I’ve worked on, I would say it’s not about capturing an actual scene or events from the book, but rather a more general expression of the most iconic elements from the story into an image (without giving anything away). It’s also important for the image to be iconic and readable from afar.
Kirill: Speaking more broadly about cover design, what are your thoughts on increasing prevalence of digital stores – for both music and books? As you’re blocking out the cover elements, do you factor in that people will see the cover – possibly significantly scaled down – on a variety of screen sizes?
Morgan: I think a good cover will hold up. These factors make it even more important for the image to be readable at a small scale. I do tend to examine my illustrations at thumbnail size whether it’s for a cover or not. I find it helps me to see the image more broadly to make sure everything is working together.
Left – illustration for New York Times Magazine, right – illustration for Westchester Magazine.
Kirill: What’s the technical process? Pen-and-paper first, and then transition to digital tools?
Morgan: While I love working with traditional media, my process has become increasingly digital. It’s a time-saver with tight deadlines, and for working in animation with continuous revisions it’s a must. To avoid the sterile, lifeless qualities that digital art can often produce I have amassed a library of paint, ink, and charcoal textures that I use to give my images a bit more of a tactile quality.
Kirill: Once the specific illustration is out of your hands and becomes a part of the final product, do you ever wish to go back and tweak it? Has it ever happened that you had what seemed to be an even better idea after the process has been completed?
Morgan: I have a bad habit of staring at my illustrations for a couple days after I’ve already sent them in to the client. Even when they’re approved I’ll sometimes send in my own revisions after the fact if something starts bugging me later. That said, once I’m finished staring at an illustration, I tend to close the book on it mentally. Overtime, I develop a constructive hatred of all my earlier work. I think that’s an important sign of growth. I’ll never be content with a piece that I’ve improved beyond, so if I weren’t hating everything I’ve ever done, I’d be worried.
Self-initiated work for imagined comic book covers.
Kirill: How do you preserve color fidelity when the final product is targeting print media, such as album or book covers?
Morgan: I’m not as much of a stickler about color as maybe I ought to be. Every monitor is different. Every printer is different. So, it’s kind of an impossible pursuit. I think if the overall color palette is strong as a unit, then it will hold up if all the colors are uniformly shifted.
Kirill: What’s the weirdest client feedback that you’ve received so far, if you don’t mind sharing? Is there any difference between working for smaller publications as opposed to larger corporate clients?
Morgan: To be honest, nothing too weird comes immediately to mind. There are certainly client decisions that I consider to be strange within the context of certain projects, but I can’t think of anything too crazy. Things like the typographic design working against the illustration, or character designs that move away from what the characters are trying to convey.
Type Design for “Crime of Passion” album cover for “Hollywood Kill”.
Kirill: One of the sections on your site is about your lettering projects. Do you see yourself branching out in the future to do type design?
Morgan: I have a background in typography and design, so lettering is something I enjoy. Type is most exciting to me when it’s combined into an illustration. So, I try to incorporate illustrated lettering here and there in my illustrations when possible. However, I don’t have a dedication to type alone the way most type designers do. So, I don’t see that becoming a more prominent aspect of my career.
Kirill: How important is it to invest time in personal projects?
Morgan: I would say it’s very important. It helps to stretch your creativity farther than assignments may allow. Exploring your own creativity in that way is perhaps the most important tool in developing an identifiable voice. All that said, I rarely work on personal projects…something I would very much like to change in the near future.
Storyboards for “The Catch” Coca-Cola pitch.
Kirill: What do you do when you run out of ideas and get stuck?
Morgan: I suppose my idea process is a little different for each field. If I ever get stuck coming up with a concept for an editorial illustration, it’s generally as simple as starting to sketch some thumbnails. Seeing different ideas on paper gives way to expanding on those ideas, changing and combining them in different ways. If I ever have trouble starting to sketch thumbnails, I find it helps to start writing down a list of words that correspond to topics in the article.
For character design, when I feel I’ve exhausted all the forms for a particular character exploration, I start to sketch almost without intention. Almost random scribbles. Then I’ll start to turn the scribbles into different forms and generally more exaggerated interesting characters will start to take shape.
Kirill: What’s the best thing about being an illustrator?
Morgan: Hard not to say something totally cliché here. I’d like to say something like…because I love the pursuit of illustration, I rarely feel like I’m working; exploring one’s own creativity is a valuable window oneself; it’s a fulfilling and exciting pursuit to work toward the impossible goal of artistic perfection; but really it’s the danger…and the power, fame, money, cars and women.
Illustration for melba.co.
And here I’d like to thank Morgan Schweitzer for his wonderful work, and for taking the time to answer a few questions I had about his art and craft. You can find his work online at his main portfolio site and his personal Tumblr stream. He’s also active on Facebook and Twitter.
