2001: A Rundown
Information Design
Information Design
Information Design
Information Design
Information Design
Information Design
Information Design
Information Design
Information Design
Designer(s)
Henry Wilkinson
Duration
9 Weeks
Recognitions
When most people watch 2001 for the first time they often walk away from it saying things like "that movie confused the hell out of me", "why are the first 20 minutes of the film just full of monkeys?" and "what was up with the giant space baby at the end?". While this two part infographic doesn't answer ALL of those questions hopefully it helps make things just a little bit clearer! ;)
Analogue Aesthetics in a Digital World
2001 made a lot of predictions about the future but in my opinion one of the most forward thinking aspects of the film was how computer interfaces were imagined. While my infographic does not match the style of most of the interfaces in the film, I wanted to appropriate the monolinear line-art aesthetic of early computer graphics. Inspired by Star Wars' Death Star plans presentation, the dish model in 2001, and the comfortable happy glow of CRT monitors I came up with this process. It's by no means an accurate re-creation but I still think it gets the point across!
Process & Pipeline
I've used Illustrator a lot over the last seven years but this was my first project using Natron, an open source node-based compositing program. Illustrator's appearance panel is great but it doesn't offer you the same level of control when applying effects that I've come to love with Nuke and Natron's respective node-based workflows. Because Natron works only with 32-bit colour it allowed me to achieve compositing results that cannot be done in Illustrator due to its limited 8 bit working space—specifically the exponential glows—as well as other effects that just aren't built into the program like accurate looking film grain and lens distortion. The great thing about node-based compositing programs is that the effects you apply to your image are (largely) separate from an input source's resolution. Vector graphics are great because they can be scaled to any resolution, similarly a procedural node-based workflow allows for the input resolution to be changed with only minor tweaks to the node-graph making it a decent companion to vector-based software. Pretty neat eh?
