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Made-up Worlds We Can Really Live In Mal: “Are you offering me a trade?” Jayne: “A trade? Hell, it’s theft. This is the best damn gun made by man. It has extreme sentimental value. It’s miles more worthy than what you got.” Mal: “What I got? She has a name.” Jayne: “So does this! I call it Vera." WHY SETTLE FOR THE LESSER DEATH RAY? | 31 — MAL AND JAYNE Joss Whedon, “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” Firefly (2002) “Speaking of Avatar and all that,” I said in ham-handed segue, “I’m stunned at the sheer amount of film work going on here.” “Yeah, it’s crazy.” Greg was kind enough to just run with it. “I don’t think people quite know just how much gets done here—how much of Avatar was made here for instance. So many movies get entirely visualized here. It’s just crazy. I don’t know what the percentage is. It’s probably quite a small percentage but for some reason it’s stuff that’s noticeable.” “Well,” I said, having just seen Greg’s name in the credits of The Adventures of Tin-Tin, my in-flight movie between Melbourne and Wellington, “it’s the better stuff.” Now, every time I really enjoy a movie’s aesthetic, I scan the credits and more often than not, Weta Workshop (and generally Greg as well) appears among the scrolling names. “I suppose,” he said, “a lot of people come here because they know it is a high quality, but also from a slightly different perspective. Our design philosophy at Weta has a very high and unique sort of criteria. Everyone talks about realism in films and Weta does too. Weta has I think a certain set of traits that help to channel that level of reality. And it may not be more real than other films at all, but its own blend that works out to be sort of that it resonates with people in whatever way.” “I suspect,” I commented, rapidly synthesizing what I knew of their work (both helped and hampered by my relative intoxication, “that the balance between the parts of the story that are important to tell visually and the parts that can kind of be left to the imagination is a big part of that.” “There is a lot of disdain in our design department for over-designed things. There are a lot of movies that have a really crappy over-designed ‘science fiction for science fiction’s sake’ kind of look. No one in our design group likes that. They tend to be grounded more in science more than fiction. They have a real sort of indus-
32 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EMBEDDED HISTORIAN’S NOTEBOOK trial design aspect to them and a real pragmatism about how people interface with the technology.” “That speaks to what you were talking about earlier about simplicity and about that need for groundedness.” “It’s important for people to understand things straight away,” Greg pointed out. “You want people to look at an object in a movie and just get it even if they can’t explain why. There might be weeks and weeks of thought involved in some object, but it should all work in two seconds of seeing it on screen—you immediately know what it is and what’s it for and why it is there. Because ultimately, design —illustrative design, sculptural design, and so on—is just storytelling. You are just telling another part of the visual story. It’s obviously the part that we’re all fascinated with. I was fascinated with it as a kid. I loved the design of Star Wars for instance or anything like that.” “Battlestar Galactica for me too,” I said. “There was always something about Star Trek and the like that missed something for me, and I think part of it was it didn’t feel real.” “It doesn’t feel used.” “Exactly,” I replied. “I got to talk to one of the guys who made the models for Star Wars when I was covering the opening of a museum exhibit and he described the aesthetic as ‘used universe.’” “Yeah, I keep on saying it,” he said, “even though it’s not popular to use Star Wars as a reference point anymore probably because it is over used and also because the recent movies are more for kids now. But it’s still totally true. It did this kind of epoch setting thing—the Millenium Falcon was a totally futuristic thing but it felt like a rickety old piece of shit which is awesome, an awesome idea.” “Because it’s so perfectly counter-intuitive,” I said. “The classic ideal of the space ship is that it’s got to be badass gorgeous and perfect…” “Well futuristic things don’t break, right?” “Totally,” I laughed. “This is something my co-author, who’s a futurist, talks about. It’s actually a big challenge for him in his work, because people tend to imagine the future as this perfectly clean, smooth, seamless, clean-shaven thing and the truth is that human beings just aren’t like that. It’s one of the big questions behind this book: how do you build a future that is human, that human beings can actually inhabit? The past has a place in that, you know? I think that people of our generation, maybe people more broadly now, are strongly drawn to objects that you can have a relationship with—that feel more like they’ve had human hands on them. Objects that carry stories, history that you can relate to. The fact that the
Page 1 and 2: AN EMBEDDED HISTORIAN’S NOTEBOOK
Page 3 and 4: STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EMBEDDE
Page 6: Futurehunting and Historyhacking |
Page 9 and 10: 4 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EMB
Page 15 and 16: Greg Broadmore (photo courtesy of S
Page 17 and 18: 12 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EM
Page 35: 30 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EM
Page 44 and 45: Index A Armadillo (movie), 29 B Bro
Page 46: About the Authors James H. Carrott

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