For Erica Dorn, working on Isle of dogs was a first for she never worked in the movie industry before. Until 2015, when she got asked to work with Wes Anderson, she only did projects in advertising designing for agency clients as a freelancer and her own clients.
Since Wes Anderson always has the aspiration to make his movies as authentic as possible, he needed a designer who is fluent in both English and Japanese. That is how Erica got offered her first job in the movie industry without any experience in the field. A dream coming true for any cineast. After passing a two-week-audition, she found a mentor in Grand Budapest Hotel- Designer Annie Atkins: “Annie gave me a crash course not just in film design work but also in the Wes Anderson method, which would have otherwise taken a lot longer to figure out.”
Overall, Erica and her team created over 1000 pieces that appear in the scenes of Isle of Dogs. She worked very closely with the people who crafted the items. Nothing is by accident, everything was intended the way you see it now on screen – from the colour of the fur to the typography on several packages.
Wes always had his eye on everything that has been done. As the perfectionist he is, he was involved in every step along the way: “Wes was very hands-on, right down to the pixel. Sometimes when you finish something you go ‘Did I do that? or was that Wes?’ It might take one try or it might take 25 before Wes decides it’s done.”
How much love and time went into the details can be noticed, for example, in the dog tags: “The machine-engraved typography on the dog tags couldn’t be too perfect,” Dorn explains. “We intentionally messed up the spacing and pushed the second S on ‘BOSS’ too far over and a little too high up because we wanted to show the hand-made-ness of everything.”
Since the movie was filmed in stop-motion every prop had to be built to scale. It was a tough process with many steps until Erica and her team achieved the perfectly produced tiny results. Just to have a look at how small the items are in real life, see the comparison of the beer can and an actual British coin.
One difficulty Erica faced during the project was the need for the items to not only look different in their design but also as if they were collected over a long period of time. An intense example is the evidence board of the American exchange student Tracy were she connects the dots behind the dog deportation conspiracy: “We actually wrote all of those articles that were pinned to the wall and made real content for the ID cards and receipts and maps,” Dorn says. “It was all hands on decks with seven of us churning out these pieces.”
The movies by the master Japanese authors Akira Kurasowa and Yasujiro Ozu served Erica and her team as inspiration. “We spent a lot of time watching their movies and collecting graphic details. Every time we saw a bookshelf or a wallpaper pattern or an arm badge, we’d screen-shot the image and file it. Later, whenever we needed interior details, textiles, things like that, we’d look at the stuff from Kurosawa and Ozu. About half of our references came from those movies.”
Get more details about Erica’s work at her talk at Forward Festival Hamburg in July. Tickets are available here.
Every month we collaborate with wemakeit, in order to show you successful projects and behind-the-scene knowledge from the projects' initiators. It's amazing to see what the combination of creative ideas and the power of people can create.
Food artist David Ma created recipe videos inspired the unique style of several famous filmmakers: Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantin, Alfonso Cuarón and Michael Bay. The short movies reimagine standard recipe videos in the style of the four famous directors.
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The Main Title Sequence celebrates the strength in standing out from the crowd. It depicts three abstract worlds using immaculate CG to portray the truly distinct markings of a fiercely independent black panther.
The Brief
To celebrate the 5th year anniversary of Forward Festival, we wanted to commission a film centered around the ‘odd’ number 5. The brief was largely left open but contained some leading quotes including: “Odd is strange” “Odd behavior” “Odd is peculiar”.
The Process
After his impressive talk at Forward Festival 2018, we identified Mill+ Director Raj Davsi as the director to bring this embryonic idea to life. Starting with very early sketches on paper, Raj and the team were able to deliver a technically complex and emotionally stirring film from concept to delivery.
The Outcome
The film was launched at Forward Festival Munich, alongside Raj's talk about the creative process behind the film. Within 2 days of release the film was awarded a Staff Pick on Vimeo.
Raj' intentions were to create a story that celebrates the individuality of being “odd” and how everyone should be proud to be different. His impression as an artist is, that every creative tries to stand out from the crowd and make work that is distinct, which is something we can all connect to. The initial focal point was to tell a story about an animal, to use their raw and unfiltered emotions to allow the viewer to build a strong connection with the message of embracing ‘the odd one out’. Also, he wanted to transport them into an ‘odd’ space: "I love telling stories through abstract art whilst trying to make an emotional connection with the viewer."
Having conducted extensive R&D, Raj found inspiration in the black panther. A rare, unique and majestic animal, rarely filmed or seen in the wild. People know they are there but they remain hidden. He and the team experimented with various patterns, colors and even feathers for the panther, using inspiration from bird patterns and unusual skin pigmentations to develop the aesthetic, the highlights and contours of the panther’s muscles and facial features were key.
The initial shots featuring the panther sprinting through the forest established the look for the wider environment. The viewer is then transported into abstract worlds where macro cameras were used inside the panther.
Raj's inspiration for the contrasting scenes came from real-world references. The eye scene took inspiration from liquid drops which contained the pattern to give a powerful and iridescent feel. The teeth world was inspired by the Cappadocia Mountains in Turkey, an incredible landscape which bears real similarities to teeth.
Lighting and rendering were used to give the piece a fantastical feel. This meant strong volumetric, 3D fog and a lot of play with lights and shadows. As the panther was black, lighting within a dark environment was a challenge for the team. With minimal diffuse values, only the fur would catch the specular highlights.
The film used multiple disciplinary soft wares and was a real collaboration amongst teams from design through to VFX. Everything was computer generated and carefully considered from the huge epic landscape to how many trees should be in the forest. Every pixel was meticulously designed and needed to be good enough to print.
We can't say it often enough: Thank you to everyone involved in this one-of-a-kind project!
Director: Raj Davsi
Creative Director: James Allen
Producer: James Yeo
Line Producer: Supreetha Murthy
Production Manager: Rebecca Pemberton
Production Coordinator: Shivangi Mehta
Audio: Echoic Audio
www.echoicaudio.com
Art Directors: Stip, Cameron Johnson
CG Supervisor: Madhur Pole
FX Supervisor: Gaurav Mathur
Asset Supervisor: Anish Mohan
Animation Lead: Mahesh MS
2D Lead Artists: Sole Martin, Vinod Gopinathan
2D Artist: Badrinath Chinimilli, Mangesh Borkar, Nehal Desai, Prasanna Bhatt, Rajeshkumar K, James Pratt,
Rich Watson
3D Artist: Kalpesh Patel, Srikar Balakrishnan, Jimmy Thomas, Prateek Shubankar, Dhruba Sinha, Asis Kumar,
Guru Prasad, Shashi Kumar Dakoju, Nishant Kumar, Sudakshina Sridharan, Amal Arjun J P, Amit Patil, AsitMidya, Nayan Bora, Kalidas Patil, Sumit Kumar, Damudar Khuman, Rakesh Bharat
3D Design: Raquel Fernandes, Ewan Davidson, Taehoon Park, Olly Johnson, Jessica Tan, Matthew Campbell
2D Animation: Kwok Fung Lam, Sam Singleton
Design & Development: Ross Urien, Grant Berry, Adam Parry, Ivo Sousa
Colour: The Mill
Forward Speaker Max did not just direct the music video, but also stepped in for Sigrid who couldn't make it due to delayed and canceled flights: There was a team of 40 people ready to shoot, but no artist. Well...
“Literally everything went wrong. Travel with park rangers, police stops, collapsed sets, loads of bad weather…my biggest weakness is singing, and I’m now in a music video, so let’s see how it goes.” says Max.
Even the beautiful sets that the team created a few days before were destroyed by a storm. After spending one month planning the shoot, which took place in the Bulgarian mountains, 
Take a look at the video:
Since Wes Anderson always has the aspiration to make his movies as authentic as possible, he needed a designer who is fluent in both English and Japanese. That is how Erica got offered her first job in the movie industry without any experience in the field. A dream coming true for any cineast. After passing a two-week-audition, she found a mentor in Grand Budapest Hotel- Designer Annie Atkins: “Annie gave me a crash course not just in film design work but also in the Wes Anderson method, which would have otherwise taken a lot longer to figure out.”
Overall, Erica and her team created over 1000 pieces that appear in the scenes of Isle of Dogs. She worked very closely with the people who crafted the items. Nothing is by accident, everything was intended the way you see it now on screen – from the colour of the fur to the typography on several packages.
Wes always had his eye on everything that has been done. As the perfectionist he is, he was involved in every step along the way: “Wes was very hands-on, right down to the pixel. Sometimes when you finish something you go ‘Did I do that? or was that Wes?’ It might take one try or it might take 25 before Wes decides it’s done.”
How much love and time went into the details can be noticed, for example, in the dog tags: “The machine-engraved typography on the dog tags couldn’t be too perfect,” Dorn explains. “We intentionally messed up the spacing and pushed the second S on ‘BOSS’ too far over and a little too high up because we wanted to show the hand-made-ness of everything.”
Since the movie was filmed in stop-motion every prop had to be built to scale. It was a tough process with many steps until Erica and her team achieved the perfectly produced tiny results. Just to have a look at how small the items are in real life, see the comparison of the beer can and an actual British coin.
One difficulty Erica faced during the project was the need for the items to not only look different in their design but also as if they were collected over a long period of time. An intense example is the evidence board of the American exchange student Tracy were she connects the dots behind the dog deportation conspiracy: “We actually wrote all of those articles that were pinned to the wall and made real content for the ID cards and receipts and maps,” Dorn says. “It was all hands on decks with seven of us churning out these pieces.”
The movies by the master Japanese authors Akira Kurasowa and Yasujiro Ozu served Erica and her team as inspiration. “We spent a lot of time watching their movies and collecting graphic details. Every time we saw a bookshelf or a wallpaper pattern or an arm badge, we’d screen-shot the image and file it. Later, whenever we needed interior details, textiles, things like that, we’d look at the stuff from Kurosawa and Ozu. About half of our references came from those movies.”
Get more details about Erica’s work at her talk at 
Therefore, Taschen released “The Star Wars Archives” – a thorough collection of images and stories, including drafts, designs and exclusive behind-the- scenes material from the original trilogy. The perfect way to get taken along into a galaxy far far away.
The book gives you an unprecedented insight in the process of designing and building spaceships, costumes and landscapes. It provides background information on the sources of inspiration for names and appearances of the beloved characters –for example C3PO as a citation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with an “Art Deco Look”. From unrealized ideas via early drawings and mock-ups through stills from the films to experience the making of beloved an iconic scenes – it’s a must-see for all eager padawans out there.
Furthermore, it includes an interview with originator George Lucas to give you a first-hand experience of working on the iconic trilogy. Get to know his way of working and his inspirations. The hints of his demanding nature towards his designers are everywhere to be found in the book, such as detailed instructions on how to create the world and characters he imagined.
Just like any other good archive it not only contains of Lucas’s vision for the designs, it also reveals his writing methods and his personal struggles while working on the film scripts. He describes a kind of creative crisis almost everyone working in a creative field can relate to.
“You go crazy writing,” he says. “You get psychotic. You get yourself so psyched up and go in such strange directions in your mind that it’s a wonder that all writers aren’t put away some place. There’s just no guideline. You don’t know if what you’re doing is good or bad or indifferent. It always seems bad when you’re doing it. It’s the hardest thing to get through.”
There are loads of articles, books and documentations about Star Wars, but the book still hits a spot that hasn’t been covered yet. In case you are new to the iconic films it might not sweep you of your feet, but if you are already a member of the rebellion or a convinced supporter of the empire you will fall in love with Star Wars all over again.
The Star Wars Archives: 1977-1983 is published by Taschen, priced at €150.