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Help needed creating futuristic computer Interfaces/ screens
I am currently creating a 20 min short action/ thriller film with a heavy presence of digital effects. I am required to make futuristic computer interfaces like in ‘The Island’, ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’, ‘I- Robot’ and other sci fi and futuristic set films. Has anyone got any ideas or tips? I plan to create the interfaces in photoshop and animate them in after effects as i know these programs well but all my efforts so far do not look sophisticated as other examples ive seen. Please help.
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6 Replies
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I like this guy’s interface stuff:
Click on tutorials, and scroll WAYYY down (stuff down low on my screen) there’s about 6 or so on interfaces, here’s another example:
sci-fi computer screens.
https://www.lyzrdstomp.com/tutorial_vidscreen/
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Have you seen this new tut below:Date: Jan 26, 2006 at 7:19:46 pm
Subject: COW Tutorials: After Effects Creating a Glass Globehttps://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=869642
I think I might creat an interface on that glass sphere, maybe without it rotating, until it had to do a super-duper future calculation. Just a thought.
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I guess the first step is to imagine the future world you’re creating, and how people might interface with machines in it … and to try to do this afresh rather than to copy some other movie’s “take” on it.
Then animate (or pysically build) that … whatever it might be. Do you think physical contact will be necessary …
HAL’s voice activation seemed to work for Kubrick, and Woody Allen’s pleasure cube had its moments … so what can you come up with that’s fresh?
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For some creative examples:
https://www.coleran.com/Portfolio/portfolio_select/pfdisplays/pf_displays_menu.html
For some tech info:
https://www.levelproductions.com/index.htmlAt a seminar, Mark said that he used the Quicktime graphics codec for fast playback. It’s 256 colours, which plays fast and works fine for clean graphic displays with solid colours.
If I recall, on set the crew triggered the playback of the different movies through Macromedia Director (maybe), watching the actors push the buttons and matching their timing when necessary. A slight delay was acceptable, certainly better than having an actor push the wrong button in the excitement of a take.
Trivia: the James Bond floor display map originally showed a dramatic zoom into each continent, but the zoom had to be dropped as it made the actors (standing on the map) queasy.
Hope that helps,
Steve -
Here’s a link to Coleran’s work you can scrutinize.
https://homepage.mac.com/mcoleran/
I found it at Steve Kilisky’s AE blog.
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Here is a link to a site for some inspiration as far as screen graphics go. They did a lot of screens for Star Wars Episode 1 and many others.
Click on “design” and then “screen graphics”.
Scott Whitehead
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