In collaboration with showrunner and executive producer David Weiner, the team designed the technology of a society in which no one wants for anything and everyone is perfectly complicit. Working across all nine episodes of the show’s first season, Territory’s team developed and delivered graphics and VFX for the future society created in Aldous Huxley’s groundbreaking novel. The technology within the world of the show is fundamental to the society and the relationships between the characters, so the execution was absolutely vital.
Brave New World
Territory Studio creates a unique vision of futuristic technology in NBCUniversal’s Brave New World. With a highly conceptual brief, Territory delivered a distinctive yet simple design language that seamlessly integrated near-future technology into the utopian production design.
Read MoreHUD/POV
Technology in Huxley’s world is driven by our HUD displays used to navigate the personal tablet of the future. The characters are able to conjure it on demand for whatever they desire. These displays can be used in a myriad of ways including memory devices, real-life cameras, or a television used personally or as part of a collective. It was important that they resembled our modern-day personal devices, used primarily for information and distraction.
We were also tasked with creating Optical Lenses which generate an AR experience for the user. It allows the character to access another’s POV, their social status, and a HUD.
Caste Signifiers
A major part of the ‘Indra’ system was a complex AI that ranks and tags characters based on their capacity for ‘breeding’. It was important that the audience could easily understand the character’s ranking, so the design had to be clear and concise.
Holograms/Invitations
We finalised a look that moved away from the conventional scanline analogue treatment. Without crushing the colours in the footage, balancing them across several shots and using the glass effect to react into the backplate it gave us subtle shifts in colour and reactivity that normally would not come from a straight composition.
Memory HUD
Maps
Our biggest challenge was to create the disturbance maps, which features in a key story moment when Bernard and the Director are searching for John. It was a difficult task creating a visual which expressed the mood of New London’s population, using stylised representations of people going about their daily lives. The elements were created in C4D in conjunction with Nuke to construct a seamless effect, from concept to final composition.
Savage Lands
The key challenge was to create an overarching design that fits this clean and ‘flawless’ world, yet is flexible enough to adapt to the narrative demands of all nine episodes.
Daena Lorne - Art Director
Research & Development
