Mark Coleran, the man who designed the tacky interfaces we love so much in cinema

March 19, 2020

Originally hosted at https://www.xataka.com/magnet/mark-coleran-hombre-que-diseno-interfaces-horteras-que-amamos-cine-1 and translated from Spanish

It is almost an unsigned pact since computers began to be recurrent in audiovisual images.

The creators cannot predict what the software will look like five years after a film is released, and that is why we accept that, in most fictions from 10 or 20 years ago with a certain futuristic component, they created ad hoc an interface with a tacky, baroque, modern aesthetic according to conventional palates, which would make all the gods of usability and efficient design howl if we had to use them in real life.

If you look closely, many of these eye-catching digital environments turned out to have certain common features. This was no coincidence: there was one guy who created almost all the display designs that have gone down in the history of the seventh art. The Bourne films, James Bond, Lara Croft, Minority Report or Children of Men all have Mark Coleran in common. Wherever there were strings of data and precognitive daydreams of what we will call Big Data, his team was there.

And how did they manage to combine the design of these softwares with the filming of the movie?

In the most rudimentary way you can imagine. As Coleran has said, these environments were still part of the performance of the scene. The actors had another priority: to concentrate on their dialogues and the believability of their performance, so their interactions with the interfaces and keyboards were more or less random. It was then the simulation staff who, on their own, synchronized the actor's movements with the monitor's responses in a game of false interactions.

“It feels like you’re using the device, but we’re actually watching what they’re doing, and from there we have ways to control it and give cues to the viewer to make it look like the character is doing something in real time,” Coleran explained. Beyond their role as creators of pretend software, they’ve also brought their design expertise to bear on contemporary displays : Coleran’s team has collaborated on the development of After Effects, Tinderbox, Silhouette FX, Layerlab, Commotion 2, and Filemaker Pro.

This gallery, in addition to reminding us of what our vision of superprocessors and cutting-edge technology was like, helps us better understand a technological path that was supposed to be and was not. In general, that standard of complex visualizations that both Microsoft and Apple in particular and recent works such as Black Mirror or Passengers have been leaving behind. Here is a review.

Blade 2.

The Bourne Identity.

The Bourne Ultimatum.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Children of Men.

The Island.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

Mission Impossible 3.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

The World Is Not Enough.