Alex McDowell interview: Fahrenheit 451, Upside Down and designing for 3D - Den of Geek

via denofgeek.com

Fascinating interview with production designer & 5D Conference co-founder, Alex McDowell with intriguing details on a new film, Upside Down, currently in production in Canada:

"It's a really interesting project. It's a French/Canadian co-production, not a big budget, by any means, a very ambitious film.

It's imagining a sort of magical realism fairy tale of a love affair between a boy from one planet and a girl from another. And the two planets are adjacent so that you can literally climb from one to the other, so they retain their own gravity. All of the objects from one world remain in the gravity of that world.

So it's a metaphor for the complications of love, and then it's got a whole other politic layer of apartheid with the two worlds. One is kind of Third World, and the other is exploitive-based upscale world."

And on his "... non-linear, immersive design process. I've been pitched here since Minority Report, really, because it's so much closer to how our minds think, it's so much closer to creative collaboration because you have this additive workspace that starts off digital but is always giving you back real data.

In the case of Upside Down, you come out of a building in one world, and you look up and the sky is full of the planet of the other. In the most mundane environments, Montreal industrial sites where I'm standing now, you're always in this kind-of-fantastical, hybrid animated extension of CGI and reality space. And you have to conceive of that world globally and think of the entire world at all times and not necessarily be making the decision of what falls into the camera and what falls into post."

It's not really a design decision, that's a production and a practical decision. But you need to conceive of these worlds holistically, and the digital design space allows you to do that in a real way. You're really building the film space from the beginning.

And I would have loved to see McDowell's envisioning of the world in Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay, one of my favourite novels of all time, but sadly the production was pulled at the last minute.

Posted via web from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales