Territory brings the 80's to Marvel's galactic adventure, lighting the screens with stylistic references, alien interfaces and clever gadgets.
Read MoreWorking closely with Director James Gunn and Production Designer Charles Wood, we created graphics and VFX for this laugh out loud story about a ragtag crew of misfit criminals who become unlikely heroes. We were tasked to create on screen graphics and vfx for all environments –
spaceships, planets, prison, street markets, gambling dens, etc, and as a story that’s more about characters and personalities than drama, we were able to take a more human, less polished creative approach to graphics.
The director wanted to introduce the characters and their backstory by using a prison lineup along with an infographic overlay as a rapp sheet. Territory built an entire UI system, so that each characters bio, X-rays, finger prints and other details were displayed bespoke to each character. As unknown entities before the movie release, this graphic device became synonymous with marketing imagery for the film.
Peter Quill’s ship, the Milano is old and has seen a lot of action, but is still beautiful with many clever modifications. Our UI needed to reflect both this engineering sophistication and Quill’s can-do attitude to hacking the system to get the extra performance he wants – he’s more interested in effective modifications than in perfect code, so our screen graphics for the ship’s navigation, weapons and entertainment are a bit rough and ready to reflect this. To convey a sense of age, our reference points were old airplanes, engineered metal and the lovely warmth of worn leather seats. As Quill has a soft spot for the 1980’s, we drew on red, orange and black colour palettes, much used in 80’s video games and early UI, and added nostalgic details, such as the music interface that Quill hacked to simulate a 1980’s tape deck.
The evil Ronan’s ship, Dark Aster was monolithic in look and dark in tone. Our direction for the UI was something that felt uncomfortable and organic. We envisaged a holographic control interface, almost a life form, being controlled and manipulated against its will. We looked at jellyfish forms and translucency, and explored buttons and controls almost protruding through the skin. Controls changed and adapted as the user interacted, but the interface almost looked as though it was under stress as it was being manipulated. It was an incredible design challenge we had set ourselves and credit goes to MPC for final execution of our vision.
The Kyln Prison screens needed a degraded military look and feel, reflecting a pared down functional aesthetic. The screen elements, including tower schematics, etc, needed to help explain Rocket’s escape plan, so balancing plot point with visual simplicity was key.
In crafting the graphic assets for Exitar, the main city on Knowhere, our reference from UI art director Alan Payne was to really evoke the sense of being in Deep Deep Space. We considered the challenges of living on the edge of the universe, what the culture was like, and how street signage and advertisements would look. This pushed us to look at alien languages featured in old Marvel comics, experimental computer graphics from the 1960s and 70’s, the concept art, costume and props departments. Ultimately, we created a series of bespoke fonts to use throughout the set and we added glitches and interference to the neon-style graphics to make them feel authentic within this rough and ready, multicultural space port.
| Compuhire | Playback |
| Director | James Gunn |
| Production Designer | Charles Wood |
| Set Decoration | Richard Roberts |
| Art Director | Alan Payne |
| VFX Supervisor | Stephane Ceretti |
| VFX Producer | Susan Pickett |
© 2014 Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy
