Supergirl joins forces with an unlikely companion on an interstellar journey of vengeance and justice when an unexpected adversary strikes too close to home. Guided by Director James Gunn’s aesthetic direction, we were tasked with creating technology interfaces design that felt retro-futuristic in feel. We designed a retro video call interface, a hologram, control panel graphics for the Brigand ship, and worked at the concept phase on Supergirl's pocket watch.
For Supergirl’s video phone, we designed the pre-call splash screen and in-call footage to follow the angular design and CRT feel of the monitor hardware. By keeping interactions simple and focusing on core functions like answer, mute, and end call within a restricted palette of reds, oranges, pinks, and magentas we achieved a fitting look. Final plates feature comped CRT pixelation and screen degradation to blend seamlessly into the physical prop environments.
We applied a restricted colour scheme of deep oranges and reds on black to give high-contrast warm aesthetic to the instrument panel interface to give a retro space feel. This stripped back nature of the graphics keep the storytelling clear and concise for the short shots where we needed quick reads to support the narrative. This stripped back nature of the graphics keep the storytelling clear and concise for the short shots where we needed quick reads to support the narrative.
We explored a range of styles and render treatments before landing on the final version. The layout of the hologram stayed fairly rigid through from temp designs allowing us to concentrate heavily on giving the hologram some personality. From initial concepts to the final shot, we iterated on elements like colour schemes, glitches, projection styles and underlying technological rationale to define the look.
We also did some concept work to help the client work out their preferred aesthetic of the countdown watch. This included defining various version of the watch face as well as some extra exploration of what this could look like under a sort of x-ray vision. The look of this element was much more refined than other graphics in the film, a slight departure from the retro futuristic style seen eleswhere.
