The Art of The Creator: Designs of Futures Past

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY GARETH EDWARDS

INTRODUCTION BY JAMES CLYNE

I: AI DREAMS

II: CASTING THE CREATOR

III: FINDING THE FAR-FLUNG FUTURE

IV: THAILAND

V: THAILAND PART II

VI: THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

VII: SOUND AND VISION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Writer-director Gareth Edwards lines up a shot on the set of The Creator.

FOREWORD

BY GARETH EDWARDS

The summer before I started film school, a small arthouse film was released called Jurassic Park. It was a seismic shift for the film industry and heralded the arrival of this new thing called computer graphics. It was instantly clear to everyone that this genie had escaped the computer lab it was born in, and it wasn’t going back in the bottle.

It was a disruptive, scary, and exciting time. Many creative roles within filmmaking that had brought so many gems to the screen were slowly being made extinct. Artists had to adapt and learn new tools to survive as this cinematic gold rush worked its way through every VFX genre you could think of.

I have to admit, as an outsider from the industry back then, I was definitely in the incredibly excited camp. My flatmate at film school was studying computer animation, and what he was able to do on a home PC just blew my mind. It was clearly only a matter of time before someone made an epic masterpiece from their bedroom.

Annoyingly, it wasn’t going to be me. Ten years later I was still learning the tools. I bought every book I could find. My bedroom shelf was an A to Z shrine of every Making of or Art of book in existence. I even went as far as buying DVD tutorials of how to create concept art by some guy called James Clyne… I know, whatever happened to him?

Another ten years and a few films later… I still walk into bookstores heading straight to the Making of section to see what new publications are out. I have to admit, perhaps one of the greatest feelings of achievement I’ve ever had was glimpsing an Art of book from Godzilla or Rogue One tucked in between two books about a classic film. I always want to turn to the fellow geek next to me looking through some book about James Cameron and point and say, I made that… but I don’t. Because that would be weird, right?

If I’m honest, when a film is finally over, I don’t tend to stay in touch with too many people. Even though I love my cast and crews, having gone through a life-changing experience together, life just goes on and everyone ultimately heads their separate ways. With one exception—concept artists.

I don’t know if it’s because of all those books I had as a kid, but if you look at the texts on my phone, I always tend to stay in touch with concept artists. I don’t know why? Maybe it’s because deep down I know I will need them to help kickstart my next film. But really, I think it’s because if I could do anything other than directing, I would like to be one of them. I don’t have the talent they do, which is why I have to stick with directing, but I do feel we are all cut from a very similar cloth.

One of the things I’m very proud of with this film is that we designed the whole thing backward. Usually, you design the whole world of the film with the concept artists. The studio then looks at these designs and tells you there’s no way on earth you can find places like that, and instead you have to build the whole thing in a studio against green screen… and I really, really, didn’t want to work like that. So instead, we did the opposite.

Before we designed everything, we went and shot the movie in locations that felt as close to the final futuristic environments as possible. Then once scenes were edited, we took frame-grabs from those shots and James Clyne and his team would start painting over them. Like, really quick speed paintings. And I mean, really quick, like five minutes a shot… The reason being that having studied all those tutorials of 30 steps to making a matte painting, it was very clear by step 2 if the image was going to look good or not.

Making the film like this became incredibly efficient. Imagine if normal filmmaking is like trying to hit a target with an arrow. You paint a target on a wall, stand back, fire an arrow, and it tends to always miss. With this new approach, it was like we fired the arrow first, then wherever it hit the wall, we stepped forward and painted a bullseye around it.

It was also important to me that the film contained lots of ideas and visuals that didn’t make any sense whatsoever. If we really got in a time machine and went to 2070 to shoot the film, we’d get back and show people the footage and they’d say, What the hell is that giant building in the background? And I’d reply, Ah, I dunno, we didn’t have time to stop and ask. If you can instantly understand everything you see, then it isn’t really the future.

There was no way of knowing when I started writing this film that AI would become such a part of the zeitgeist in 2023. Just like there is no way of knowing as I write this introduction where AI technology will take filmmaking and the world. What I do hope is that there is some kid in a bookstore somewhere reading this paragraph, in the very excited camp about the future. These next few years are going to be their Jurassic Park moment. Maybe AI will eventually destroy the world, or maybe it’s all paranoia and it will just help democratize filmmaking. Creating tools where you no longer need tens of millions of dollars, and anyone can make an epic masterpiece from their bedroom. Whichever way it goes, like Alphie, it’s clear this genie has escaped the computer lab it was born in, and it isn’t going back into the bottle.

A hover-boat skims across the waters of New Asia in The Creator.

INTRODUCTION

BY JAMES CLYNE

I first met Gareth Edwards in the winter of 2019 at a Santa Monica pub. Despite my brief stint working on Rogue One (2016), we had never actually met in person. We spent hours in that pub discussing a new story he was working on and diving deep into our shared love for all things sci-fi from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Eventually, those cultural influences provided the visual foundation of The Creator.

During our initial research, one of our many inspirations was Ron Fricke’s 1992 film Baraka, which was filmed in 70 mm. It was shot exclusively using natural light and showcased immersive real-world visuals. It captured the intricate interplay of life and death, and it explored the complexity and diversity that exist within our world, from the bustling Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong to the temples of Angkor Wat. These places sparked our imagination, and we wondered how they would look in a sci-fi setting, fifty years in the future, with the introduction of a synthetic culture and, more specifically, AI-driven robots.

As you will see, this film is full of design work, and because of that, we knew we were going to design all the way up to the end. To accomplish that, we stayed light on staff during the early development phase and kept some of that money for postproduction. That allowed us to keep the Art Department going well after the end of the shoot, and that meant we could keep iterating and tweaking the look, always pushing for a better design. Gareth and I spent a lot of time together discussing, strategizing, and drawing over Zoom calls.

Unfortunately, early in the development, the pandemic hit. As a result, our shoot was going to be pushed for months, if not forever. Fortunately, that meant Gareth and I could spend more time on Zoom. A lot more time. We took the opportunity to dig deep into what our movie would look like. From the overall aesthetic of NOMAD, to futuristic tanks and jet-copters, to the design of Joshua’s tattoos, we covered it all. The two of us joked that he was putting me through the paces, like a workout scene from Rocky IV, lifting logs, trudging through high-snowed tundra. We worked fast, iterating on as many concepts as we could, sometimes producing hundreds of ideas for just one set or design. Luckily, that extra time allowed us to home in on what our film’s visual identity would eventually become.

As the film’s production gathered steam, Gareth’s vision provided endless challenges for our art department, whom he asked to create something fresh but also grounded in an existing reality. Our artists met that challenge and succeeded through a display of invention and ingenuity.

Gareth didn’t just want to develop a new aesthetic for his film; he wanted to build it in an entirely new way. Not only was I stepping into the role of Production Designer for the first time, but now Gareth was also asking me to look differently at how to make a film. Terrifying!

Because Gareth’s start was in VFX, he has a unique perspective. Rather than the usual three main phases of film production—preproduction, principal photography, and postproduction—he saw a more organic approach. We mixed VFX shots with location shoots and set builds in a totally new way. At some times we were guerrilla in our technique, and at others we behaved like a major Hollywood production going for the big payoff. We didn’t see the process as separate units; we saw the moviemaking experience as one entity.

We set out to prove that things didn’t have to be done the way they had been done before, not only by pushing the visual content to new levels, but also by reimagining how high concept films can be made. In the end, who knows, maybe we created a ripple in the waters of filmmaking that will have a lasting impact going forward.

James Clyne Production Designer

CHAPTER I

AI DREAMS

Production designer James Clyne made this image to explore how the city of the future could have evolved. Edwards wanted some buildings to have distinctive glyphlike shapes.

Director Gareth Edwards wanted to create a world that had clearly evolved from our own, so the concept art combined futuristic elements with familiar contemporary architecture.

It’s 2001, and in Muswell Hill, a leafy suburb in the north of London, an aspiring young filmmaker toils away at his computer late at night. In the corner of the room, a television plays softly. A Japanese film comes on the screen. The young man doesn’t know what it is, or who the actors are. But the image of a sword-carrying samurai and a little child held in his arms immediately pricks his attention. It was, says Gareth Edwards, a moment that has stayed with him for the past two decades.

The British-born Edwards later discovered it was a clip from Lone Wolf and Cub, a movie series that began in 1972, inspired by Japanese manga comics about an assassin named Ogami Ittō and his three-year-old son, Daigoro. That juxtaposition of a jaded warrior and a little child really spoke to me, he says. You want to go off and have an adventure, but you’re supposed to raise this kid. You don’t want to, necessarily, but you grow to love the child. I just loved that dynamic.

It struck him as a fertile idea for a movie. Years later, as Edwards began writing his 2010 feature debut, Monsters, he began to play around with the notion. "The first thing I remember trying to do with Monsters was a soldier who had to take this child back to America, he recalls. Over time, the story morphed into something different: a photojournalist escorting his employer’s daughter to safety in the midst of an alien infestation. Edwards, though, never let his original idea drop. I always kept it in my pocket," he says.

Made with a skeletal