Screen graphics in "The Peripheral" by Clark Stanton.

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews on fantasy user interfaces, it’s my pleasure to welcome Clark Stanton. In this interview he talks about the chaotic nature of productions and how screen graphics fit into supporting the story, differences between working on set and in post production, the pace of episodic productions, and the potential place of generative AI in this creative field. In between these and more, Clark talks about his work on screen graphics for “Chicago MED”, “Free Guy”, “Moonfall”, “Tomorrow War” and “The Peripheral”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Clark: Hey, I’m Clark Stanton, I’m a creative director and playback graphic supervisor at Twisted Media. I have been creating and facilitating screen graphics for a little less than 11 years. I started after school at a luxury realty company, and moved on to freelance motion design before landing my first full time job at a small production company. I started my career in film and TV after I met Derek Frederickson (who you’ve also interviewed) at a Chicago motion artist meetup where we became friends. A little later on when he got particularly busy, and convinced me to drop my other motion design job and join Twisted Media as his first full time employee. I had no idea what to expect and was incredibly lucky to fall into a dream job.

Kirill: Do you ever think how lucky we are to have been born into this digital world, and not 200 years ago where we would have to plow fields as peasants?

Clark: Absolutely. I’ve been a nerd through and through since I can remember. My brother and I started the first Starcraft club at our junior high. We were always networking computers across the house and playing with technology. We were fortunate enough to have access to some of that pretty early on in our development, and it spawned a love for computers and technology – that helped lead me to where I am in film. Honestly, I can’t even imagine doing anything else.

Kirill: As you joined the field and got a glimpse or two about how the sausage is made, if you will, do you remember being particularly surprised by how things work behind the scenes?

Clark: I always thought that every production had a plan that they were executing, these perfect machines that churned out magic. But the real nature of production is there is plan, but it’s always chaotic. You have all these individuals coming on a new group project, and everyone’s learning how to work with each other well. They’re building the plane in real time, making decisions in real time. Production might be focusing on one area or another because it’s extra complex, and our part in telling the story is usually pretty small in the grand scheme of things. So because we always have the golden parachute of going green and figuring it out later in post. We often get pushed to the edge of that creative decision making.

It’s been interesting to learn how to advocate for yourself, to make sure that the production gives you the answers you need, so that you can solve their problems and move the story along – hopefully in camera. And when that doesn’t work, then it’s always fun jumping into post and learning where the edit went and what actually needs to be there. Sometimes you have a huge elaborate graphic that you built for set, and it gets cut down. Maybe they liked the actors’ reactions, and now they’re changing the edit and trimming down or transforming what was in the original script to make the story more clear, until you’re left with just one of the original ten beats.

Screen graphics for the loading simulation on “Moonfall” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: Do you have a preference to work on set versus in post?

Clark: I personally like to build the graphic for set. It’s more fun to play with the dynamic timing. You don’t know how the actor’s going to read their lines, or how much they’re going to pause or emphasize something or play up the drama. Having the reference there for them so that they can point to the screen or read the screen or react to it is much more enjoyable for me.

That said, there’s so much more freedom in post. You know where the edit’s going. You know exactly what you need to see. You usually have a little bit more time on post to get those creative answers and have the attention of the director or the producer. You can play with that part of the story a little bit more precisely.

Kirill: Is there a particular set of skills a person needs in order to not get burned out?

Clark: As a person that’s a workaholic by nature, I think that you need a hobby that isn’t in front of a screen. I’ve always played video games. I’ve always loved creating my own art. This industry has taught me that I need to stand up more and get away from my desk, and that’s my main advice to somebody that is going to try and get into this industry. Make sure that you have a good hobby that you can disconnect with. This industry is feast or famine. You have to take the jobs when they come, sometimes they overlap, and that’s a recipe for burnout.

I personally lift weights, swim or go biking. That has definitely helped me to come back fresh and creative for the next project.

Kirill: There are different names to this industry – playback design, screen graphics, fantasy user interfaces. Do you have a preference on which one best fits what you do?

Clark: Screen design or playback graphics is more how I associate. FUI comes in a lot more when you get into some of the cooler, more post fantasy projects, where you get to explore a holographic HUD in Iron Man or Spider-Man. They’re all applicable. I favor playback, so I tend to lean that way. But if you’re talking to a layman, they might only recognize FUI because of the nature of press coverage for the more recognizable projects.

Kirill: Putting on that layman’s hat, how do you tell me what your job is and why it’s needed? I have my layman’s phone in my pocket and my layman’s computer at home, and those have plenty of user interfaces already on them.

Clark: The easiest way I get it across to people is through cues. If a director wants you to start from the middle of the scene, the actors need to remember where they were, and then continue that scene from the middle. Now, if they have real phones for texting back and forth, you’re interacting with those messages. What happens when it’s a reset? Props has to run in and delete all those text messages, but also to reset the phone time because it’s been 5-10 minutes since the last take. That’s one aspect of it – replayability and manipulation.

The other part is the legal aspect. If you have a villain, Samsung or Apple probably don’t want them to have their product in there for the bad guy. Creating fake interfaces allows you to get around legal clearances.

Screen graphics for the lander cockpit on “Moonfall” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: We have such powerful devices in our pockets in the last 10-15 years, in terms of what you can do on them, and also in terms how well some of those interfaces are designed. Do you find it a little bit difficult to compete with such real life interfaces, to elevate the screen graphics in that movie beyond what we see in our daily lives?

Clark: The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that people are just more familiar with interfaces. We have way more capability on the iPhone today versus 15 years ago. But that also allows you to flow through your interfaces faster. You can “cheat” that a character pressed a hotkey or swiped their phone in a certain way and skipped steps to get to what the story needs. So in that sense it can be a little easier for real world graphics to come across to the audience. You get a lot more leeway with the audience, because they understand interfaces more now – because it’s in front of them all the time.

As for elevating graphics beyond what we see in our daily lives, I think that really becomes story dependent, for instance on Peripheral, even a futuristic show wanted to keep the graphics pretty minimalistic and grounded.

Kirill: Is it more limiting to design for phone interfaces in a movie because you have a smaller surface to work?

Clark: It’s certainly limited for secondary details. You always have enough room for the pop-up or the text message because that’s what you need to see, but you don’t get to relay any secondary information. If you’re in a big command center, the center of the screen might be the map, and all the side information might be what enemies you’re tracking or what code you’re hacking or any of those things. And on the phone you really only have real estate for that hero moment. If they’re typing or swiping, you have fingers directly in front of the screen that will obscure your message.

It is a little bit more limiting, but at the same time it’s very direct. You don’t have room to change it unless you get into the fantasy aspect of it where maybe you can add depth to it.

Kirill: Is video the safest format in terms of putting something on the screen without having to tell the actor which buttons to press?

Clark: I lean towards interactive graphics over video loops. The graphic only does what it’s supposed to do in story, so the interactive part usually isn’t too complex for the actor. As opposed to cued video loops, where sometimes actors may have to mime the action, like typing, which is much more difficult to keep up with than actually tapping the screen or keyboard.

Kirill: Without going into proprietary details, how complex is the custom playback software that Twisted Media has?

Clark: It’s gotten fairly complex. We have proprietary tools to run hundreds of computers, cross platform with phones, tablets, Mac, Windows. It’s gotten to be really robust over the last 7-8 years that Derek has been developing it to the point where now most of the bugs are worked out. It’s quite complicated to work cross platform with all of these devices always updating every year. There’s vast quality differences in a $30 Android phone that props picks to gets smashed against the wall vs the top tier iPhones and what they can play back.

Kirill: Looking back to when you started in 2013 or so, do you see significant changes in capabilities of tools at your disposal, and in expectations from studios and audiences?

Clark: It’s not necessarily about trying to exceed what has been done before. It’s more about fitting what you’re doing to story.

When we started, our tools at Twisted Media were certainly less robust. We still used Adobe Animate (back when it was Flash) for our interactive graphics, but they were much more time consuming to generate. If I needed a page to scroll for a website, I would make that a custom app that could scroll just that segment. Now we have a template that we can apply with one line of code, and it makes anything scroll. It’s a lot easier for us to do complex and layered interactions now.

What’s expected of productions has always been the same. We’re always world building and creating our part of the story to propel the character forward on whatever adventure they’re on. If you’re on a sci-fi project and the missile is coming across the ocean, you’re still tracking that on a giant screen or a desktop. You still need that story to move forward. You don’t need to one-up what you did the last time, as the graphic plays its part.

Screen graphics for “Chicago MED” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: Getting to the productions that you’ve worked on, let’s start with “Chicago Med”, “Chicago P.D.” and “Empire”. You’re listed in IMDb on 100+ episodes of each one of these shows. Can talk about the volume of work? How do you keep consistency across so many episodes, while still introducing new elements and keeping it fresh for the audiences?

Clark: We’ve been lucky enough to be on the Chicago shows through their entire run. I’ve been on every episode of “Chicago Med” other than the pilot that Derek did before he hired me. And we started on season two of “Chicago P.D.”

Both shows have had a couple redesigns, as new production designers came in and refreshed the sets. For keeping the consistency, we have our stable of content that we use as a template, and then adjust to story as needed. Season eight of “Chicago Med” introduced holographic operating room [OR] elements, and we had to fill LED volumes with all these medical procedures, and that was way out of the scope of real world ORs. So that was a really fun refresh for a show usually grounded in reality.

Otherwise we have a ton of real world reference. Each show has great consultants that help us show what’s medically accurate, what search the police would do to find this information, and how they would get that story point across quickly. It has been a wonderful journey across all these years.

For the volume of work, it changes pretty wildly week-to-week. Some episodes focus more on character development than looking through surveillance footage, or vice versa. Empire had some of the biggest swings when they would need video wall content for a new song every episode, and we would usually only have three or four days with the finished music to come up with several minutes of animated video.

Screen graphics for “Chicago MED” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: Do you ever go to a doctor and you see one of those old Windows XP machines running their whole office?

Clark: Absolutely. We’re expecting our first son in January and through my “medical expertise” on “Chicago Med” I was able to see what the ultrasound tech was seeing before they even explained it to us. That was fun, even if my wife didn’t share my humorous take on it. It’s incredible what you get to notice from all that exposure to it. Even if what you notice is horribly outdated software.

Kirill: How does the production cycle go for these traditional episodic productions that last for the bigger part of the year?

Clark: The 22-episodes seasons on network television usually film from July to about the beginning of May. You get most of May and June off from the major productions, and usually the crew are gone until the prep for the next season, or they pick up a pilot in between.

If there was going to be a whole graphics refresh, we’d have a meeting about that right away at the start of the next season and get that prep work done before we’re in the churn of doing even and odd episodes. Otherwise, it’s an eight day prep and eight day shoot cycle, and you get into a groove. You get the script for one, you break it down, then you move on to the graphics meeting, you get the work done, you send it out for previews – and then on to the next episode. All while you deal with any changes that might come out from set, or any requests from post as they dive into the edit.

Screen graphics for “Chicago MED” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as a defining color or a brand color for any of the shows?

Clark: None of them have been so specific to say that we only use this blue or that grey. They all have their color set that the both the cinematographer and the production designer are happy with, but it’s usually not so specific to be staying in a particular range of colors. It’s also been relatively grounded in real-world graphics for a lot of those shows. There’s not too much need to experiment or push the bounds, because that’s not what they’re trying to do.

Kirill: Going to “The Bear”, I don’t remember any particular screen graphics when I binge watched it this summer.

Clark: We played a very small part on “The Bear”, there’s like five or ten text messages, and a couple tablets with seating charts. The prop master Laura Roeper, wanted something for the actors to hold there for reference, most of the time it wasn’t inserted. And in season three there was a scene at Tina’s old job that had her monotonously filling out timesheets in some payroll software, but that’s about it.

It was still so fun being a part of the production and seeing the chaos behind the scenes that translates so well to the chaos on the screen. Half the time I wasn’t quite sure what they were going to shoot the next day, and I don’t think they were either. They would go in and just shoot 12 pages of dialogue some days – and for reference, normally it’s closer to 3-4 pages. That high energy on set translates to screen really well, at least from what I was able to witness.

Screen graphics for “Free Guy” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: What did you do on “Free Guy”, and how much time did you spend on it?

Clark: We were brought on to do the Tsunami offices for the fictional video game company in the movie, along with a few other sets like Millie’s apartment. Derek and I went out to Boston for a couple weeks on location and then finished the rest of the production remotely. The team at Twisted filled about 120 monitors with a whole bunch of nondescript 3D software, and video game code, along with user stats and admin controls, and maps for the video wall. We also did a bunch of hero graphics Keys and Mouser, most of which were ultimately replaced in post. Our original direction was ‘everything is real’ and I think they decided real wasn’t as cool as it needed to be for such a fun project. A lot of other work we temped in for post, and it was fun to see what elements they kept or referenced.

All told I think we were full time for about three months and then production and post trailed on for a while longer.

Kirill: How big are your files when you’re talking about filling 120 screens with graphics?

Clark: It really depends on what kind of graphics there are. A lot of the background stuff can be 2D. A couple documents coming up in a police precinct is very different than a 3D video game company that has to pretend to work on all of those files. For a hundred police screens it might be a couple gigabytes, and for hundred video game screens or command center screens with 3D models and other elements could be a couple hundred gigabytes to a terabyte.

Screen graphics for “Free Guy” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: How afraid is everybody to lose files?

Clark: Thankfully, through the miracle of cloud computing, we work on either Dropbox or Box or whatever the production needs. Most things aren’t local only, so the worst case is you to resync files. That has happened before where someone thought something was done and they archived it or they moved a folder – and there is a moment of panic before you relocate them and resync.

It is way less stressful than it used to be. Before you would spend hours mocking up a complicated asset, and then you would have to start from scratch because your computer crashed. Live syncing has saved a lot of that.

Kirill: Is there something like an industry standard or an agreed upon chain of tools that productions are using, or is it different from production to production?

Clark: Most tools production side are pretty streamlined. Distribution is usually the same software. I assume the writers use whatever they’re comfortable writing in, as long as that program supports one of the industry standard formats. In the creative realm we use industry standard tools – After Effects, Cinema4D, the rest of the Adobe suite.

Screen graphics for the DNA bonding sequence on “Tomorrow War” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: What was your part on “Tomorrow War”?

Clark: We did “Tomorrow War” as a company from production through post. I was not on the production because I was on other projects, but I stepped in for post and did some of the lab work towards the end of the movie where they’re trying to bond the virus to the alien DNA to wipe out the aliens. I did a bunch of different versions of the screens for how that DNA process was going. They go through so many different samples, and it ended up on a pretty cool visualization that isolated different DNA strands and then associated them with their nucleotides. It had a bunch of elements flying back and forth between the two, which was really fun.

I also reworked some of the battlezone maps in their command center when they’re first dropped in Miami to clarify the story, and the jump command screen where they wanted to reference the portal that they created on the screen.

Screen graphics for the jump command sequence on “Tomorrow War” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: Is it a little bit painful to see how sometimes little time your sequences get on the screen?

Clark: No, it’s really cool that we get to be front and center, whereas if you think about a lot of other vital parts of the production that can be so background, or just lend a textural feel to the scene. A lot of the times we get a ton of creative freedom to tell the story, and we are almost guaranteed that two seconds. It might not seem like a lot, but we’re the two seconds that’s “Oh no, the aliens are coming”, or the text message warning not to go to the meeting that’s an ambush or the hacker that breaks into the system.

The only times it gets a little frustrating is when you have a lot communication about one specific graphic, that ends up on the cutting room floor. But I’m always happy to see anything that we do up on the big screen, no matter how brief.

Kirill: You also did post production work on “The Peripheral”. How was it?

Clark: That was a really interesting show, we were brought on by a producer that knew Chris Kieffer and were replacing some of the graphics used in production as well as creating some newer FUI graphics. We also worked with Mark Coleran for some of the drone sequences where he did some of the base animation before he switched over to “Westworld” to help Noah Schloss on post.

Even though it was set in the future, they wanted really simplified almost monochromatic interfaces for the FUI’s, to imply simple and intuitive use, where gestures drive a lot of the technology and we only introduce the concept so the audience can understand it moving forward.

Screen graphics for NASA screens on “Moonfall” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: What about “Moonfall”?

Clark: That was one of our first productions after the initial Covid shutdown so we were really excited to be working again on such a large project. The VFX producers worked with a consultant at NASA to give us a real time simulation of what the moon spiraling towards earth would look like. Chris, Noah and I used that for all the major command centers throughout the film. Chris created the global timeline to run throughout the story and then Noah and I broke off parts to create the hero story beats as they learned more about why the moon was out of orbit.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as your favorite production so far, or are they all your babies?

Clark: They’re all my babies. I have enjoyed working on every show. It’s always a challenge to come in, and see what’s needed for the story, and go from there. It’s gotten to the point where I embrace the chaos and just really enjoy it.

Kirill: Do you occasionally put Easter eggs for people to find if they hit pause at just the right moment?

Clark: The biggest Easter egg we do is just use our names for search terms or other similar things. You don’t want to insinuate that someone real is in a list of criminals or clearances gets really mad at you. Other Easter eggs are generally frowned upon, unless the production wants to do an explicit reference to an old video game or an old show that a producer worked on. When you work on a show like “Star Trek”, you wouldn’t want to accidentally change something with such a storied history.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as your most favorite and least favorite color?

Clark: I thankfully really like working with orange [laughs]. Blue and orange is obviously a trope for every screen graphic or movie poster. So I like when we get to do something a little less traditional, but they’re tropes for a reason. As for least favorite, I think Empire wore me out from a lot of gold on black, at least for now.

Kirill: How many shades of blue do you know by heart?

Clark: I don’t know that I could put a good number on that. There are some that I use frequently enough that I know them by heart, and there are some where I just know the hue slider.

Screen graphics for NASA screens on “Moonfall” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: What’s the biggest font size you ever went on those red flashing alert dialogues?

Clark: Probably 400ish, the limit is whatever the director wants. I’ve been told that my giant pop up wasn’t big enough and “make it 20% bigger”. That happens all the time. You only have those two seconds, so it’s got to be noticeable.

Kirill: On the spectrum of “this is the best” to “burn it all down and start fresh”, how do you like your software tools?

Clark: They do a lot really well. After Effects is both the best and worst program. It is capable of so much, and at the same time it’s getting to feel quite dated, when you use it to render simple videos or to pass through footage. On the brighter note, I can open a project from 10 years ago and copy some layers and key frames, and I don’t think it gets enough credit for that. That is pretty incredible.

I’ve been burned out by Maya. It got too convoluted. I started with Cinema4D, and 3D software is supposed to be intuitive. I tried to make the switch several times for rigging and character animation, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was too deep in the weeds for many interactions.

Kirill: Similar to the concern about backups, is there a general concern about not being able to read older files in terms of format support?

Clark: Cinema4D had some of that where they’ve rewritten some of their base to where you can’t open you know pre R12 unless you have R19. We actually keep a laptop that has R19 to upgrade those files. Otherwise it hasn’t really been a problem. If there is anything that we think we would use like that, we might render out as a lossless asset to then chop up in After Effects. It hasn’t been a problem that we’ve run into yet. We’ve been able to either open stuff up or, in the rare case, rebuild it. Nothing has been so detrimental that it wouldn’t be worth the rebuild if we needed that asset.

Kirill: How disruptive was Covid for yourself, for the company, for the industry?

Clark: Covid was obviously a massive hurdle. We’ve always been work from home, so that part got really easy. The fact that meetings switched from in person to on Zoom made that part much more logistically easy.

Obviously the industry shut down, and we were out of work for almost as long as the strike before productions picked back up. It was a challenging time to learn with the production companies what they could and couldn’t get away with new in-person set requirements. There was a lot more video assist work since people in a physical area were limited. So you could stream from the set cameras to the production offices or at home.

Kirill: Is it largely over?

Clark: Yes, they ended Covid restrictions last year, productions no longer test everyone every day. As for the strike, we’re still healing from it. Productions aren’t as common right now. The streaming wars have certainly settled. A lot of the companies that were starting their own streaming services are trying to internally battle with what the value add is of their own content versus the cable model of syndication. I don’t think we’ll see the resolution of that until probably next year. We’re still more healing from the strike, as Covid has been pretty much over.

Screen graphics for LED wall on “Empire” by Clark Stanton.

Kirill: Generative AI has created a lot of concern in various creative industries. Without asking you to predict where it will be, how do you see it today? Is it a threat? An asset?

Clark: Right now I think it’s an asset. We generate lots of extra text. It’s not story, it’s not proprietary, we just need 20 codes with some letters and numbers. It’s great at a lot of that extra mindless detail where you don’t want to accidentally come up with the same ten abbreviations. It’s also great to toss in some ideas to Midjourney, and maybe get something to inspire you quickly, or get close to what you think you wanted to do, then translate that into your design.

It can be a threat. I think that producers and executives think that they can do more with it than they can. I don’t know if that’s part of the equation for why we’re still dealing with some of the strike fallout where people are hesitant to commit to productions. Maybe they think that in a year they’ll be able to type this in as a prompt. I don’t think we’re going to get there anytime soon, but some people might be overestimating its ability and that could be a factor.

I see it as a tool to use to automate some of the simple things. If I need to alter a script or a complex expression in After Effects, I’ve used it to help with that. Where it goes in 10 years? Who knows.

Kirill: One of the arguments against it is that it can only regurgitate existing art instead of creating new one. But then there are certain parallels where a human artist does not live in a vacuum. They see the art that was made before and that is being made today, they absorb it, they get inspired, and they might create something that is reusing some of those elements. How much of art is truly unique when almost everything is a remix.

Clark: Sure, everyone has probably used a shade of blue that was similar to what was used before. I don’t think that that gets to the place where you’re necessarily copying an artist or just being derivative.

Current AI is regurgitating what is around. You can see that if you give it a coding prompt, that it might pull up some code that technically might work, but is really just copy pasted from this journal over here and doesn’t work in context. The same thing goes for visual AI. It’s working off of the data set you give it, and that is one of the problems currently. Where is that data coming from? Sure, you could train it off of only your own work and then use that as derivative of your own style.

The way I see it currently is that it can’t create a new idea. Even in an artist’s process of copying references from other people, you’re still creating it and putting your own spin on it. A lot of the time when you do that, you get those happy accidents of things that you wouldn’t have thought to do or a process that was only necessary because of the constraints of the project. That adds a lot more value to the art that you make, or the design that you produce. That isn’t evident yet in AI generated content.

Kirill: Do you want at some point to explore the field of real world interfaces?

Clark: I feel like I get to scratch that pretty well in my job now. We get a lot of contemporary projects. They ask to recreate something, or give us something close to a certain everyday interaction. You get to play with what modern UIs do, just as much as you get to play with fantasy UIs. I certainly wouldn’t say no to a project to design a real world interface for some app or software, but thankfully I get at least a little of that every day.

Kirill: Do you ever have a moment of “I wish I knew this when I was starting out”? If you could jump back in time and tell yourself to not worry about this one thing, what would that thing be?

Clark: I’d tell myself to code more, be it in After Effects scripts or Cinema4D. You can make templates for all sorts of cool results, and that knowledge can serve you well.

As for not worrying, a lot of artists I’ve come across have some level of imposter syndrome. How did I get to work on this cool project? Should I be doing this? Is my work good enough? You’re designing and problem solving with these creatives. If they like it, they like it. If they don’t, they don’t. Art and design are relatively subjective, as long as the visual problem is solved.

A lot of people worry too much about that, and it’s stress that they don’t need. They could be putting their energy into cooler projects and cooler art and cooler work – and not worry about if it’s good enough. If the person that’s asking for it likes it, move on and enjoy.

Screen graphics for “Chicago MED” by Clark Stanton.

And here I’d like to thank Clark Stanton for taking the time out of his busy schedule to talk with me about the art and craft of screen graphics, and for sharing the supporting materials for the interview. You can also find Clark on his Instagram profile. And if you’re interested to read additional interviews about the wonderful world of screen graphics and user interfaces for film and TV, click here for more.