Category Archives: Entertainment Design

A Special Invitation to “Syd Mead: Progressions” [Updated with image gallery and "2019" video]

"Hypervan-Profile" (2005) by Syd Mead.

Currently on view at the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale, Syd Mead: Progressions is a retrospective that spans more than 50 years of artwork by legendary visual futurist and Art Center alumnus Syd Mead TRAN ’59.

The exhibition—which includes paintings of everything from extraterrestrial vehicles to interplanetary resort destinations—is a spectacular opportunity to get an up-close-and-personal view of Mead’s work and to appreciate his uncanny ability to translate contemporary concepts into believable visions of the future.

To help celebrate Progressions, Art Center College of Design and Forest Lawn are co-hosting a special presentation at Forest Lawn Museum next Thursday, March 8, from 7–10 p.m. Mead will speak about his work at 8 p.m. and a book signing will immediately follow.

If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP to alumni@artcenter.edu.

Forest Lawn Museum is located at 1712 South Glendale Ave., Glendale, CA 91205.

Head past the jump for a gallery of additional images and the featurette “2019: A Future Imagined,” in which Mead reflects upon the nature of creativity and how it drives the future.

Continue reading →

Armory Center for the Arts to Showcase Entertainment Design Department’s “Fantastic Scenarios”

Detail of a painting by Entertainment Design student Annis Naeem.

“I plan on bringing a little bit of Hollywood into this department,” Tim Flattery told us last year after he was named chair of Art Center College of Design’s Entertainment Design Department. “Rather than just having companies come in to look at student’s artwork, we’re also going to showcase the students and the College.”

And now it’s not just the entertainment industry getting a new level of exposure to the work created by Entertainment Design students, but the general public as well, as the exhibition Fantastic Scenarios debuts at the Armory Center for the Arts this Saturday night with an opening reception from 7:00-9:00 p.m. The exhibition, which was organized by Flattery and runs through May 13, features work created by current Entertainment Design undergraduate students.

From the Armory’s website:

Designing new worlds, characters, and objects that have never before been seen requires great imagination as well as an understanding of how things are built — and how to communicate with the people who will build these new worlds. Art Center’s Entertainment Design curriculum helps students develop the skills and creative focus required of concept designers in the entertainment industry.

For more information on the Entertainment Design Department, visit Art Center’s website.

Don’t Miss Design Runway This Friday

Environmental Design student Belle Shang will present her BeWild winter accessories at Design Runway.

This Friday, Art Center College of Design will hold its annual Design Runway show at the College’s Hillside Campus. The show, which is free and open to the public, focuses on how industrial design and visual art students are expressing themselves through apparel design.

“This is a runway show unlike any other,” said Design Runway instructor Justine Parish of the event which marks the culmination of the course of the same name. “Apparel design at Art Center is less about fashion than it is an outlet for students from all departments to explore a new medium for their creativity. As a result, we have Product Design students creating performance sportswear for space travel, Illustration students creating jewelry, Transportation Design students creating high fashion shoes and everything in between.”

Continued after the jump.

Continue reading →

Students Preparing for “Idea to Pitch” this Sunday [UPDATE]

A group of Art Center students have spent the past 13 weeks preparing and rehearsing for this Sunday’s Idea to Pitch, a red carpet Hollywood-style event that marks the culmination of the Entertainment Design Department’s first course to integrate written story development with concept art.

Hosted by Idea to Pitch instructor Nick Pugh, the event will feature 11 upper-term students–eight from Entertainment Design, two from Illustration and one from Film–pitching original intellectual property created during the course to an invited audience of Hollywood studio heads, producers, talent agents and development executives, including individuals from Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures and Creative Artists Agency.

The concept behind the experimental Idea to Pitch course is to empower Entertainment Design students by showing them they can shift from being a work-for-hire concept artist to a content owner. How is this accomplished? By teaching them how to wed their original film treatments with dramatic concept art to effectively sell their ideas.

And what better way to teach this concept than to have the students actually pitch to real decision-makers in Hollywood?

“These students have been practicing their pitches every week since week one of this term,” said Pugh, who says the course eschewed traditional critiques and instead had each student revise and refine their pitch each week. “As an instructor, I’ve tried my very best to cultivate ideas that are original, unique and very sellable. I want the students to understand what it means to make something that has real value.”

“The goal of the course is to teach students how to own their intellectual property, how to pitch it and how to become an overall conceptualist,” added Tim Flattery, Chair of the Entertainment Design Department, while emphasizing that the real-world element at play at the event will make the proceeding all the more dramatic. “If somebody at this event is interested in optioning their story? Well, that’s all the better.”

Idea to Pitch takes place this Sunday, December 11 at noon. Creative individuals in the entertainment industry interested in attending can RSVP to maritza.herrera@artcenter.edu or 626.396.2464.

UPDATE 12/16/11:

Hollywood producers, writers, development executives and other invited individuals filled the LA Times Auditorium this past weekend for the inaugural Idea to Pitch, where they were treated to 11 full-length motion picture pitches that ranged from a sci-fi thriller to a children’s fantasy to to an absurdist action comedy. Feedback from the audience–which included individuals from RGH Entertainment, Bad Robot, Ziskin Productions, Digital Ranch, Paramount Pictures and Blacklight–was both positive and constructive, with one producer commenting that the pitches were substantially better than what more than 90% of professional writers come into his office to pitch. That comment drew both a laugh from the audience and a feigned outrage of one nearby writer who cried, “Hey, I’m sitting right here!”

Students received tips on everything from how to adjust their pitches to match specific budgets to how to keep their cool during a high-pressure presentation. One producer in the audience asked the students, “Out of curiosity, how many of you are so passionate and excited about your project that you want to turn it into a script?” To which every student in the class raised their hands.

“I’ve always pitched this class as a pipeline to real projects,” said instructor Nick Pugh, responding to the question. “This not a theoretical class. This class, with its focus on property creation and property ownership, is not just about getting a good job. It’s about heading out into the industry with a property that’s worth something.”

Turns out the student’s properties may already be worth something. According to Pugh, individuals invited to the event expressed interest in three of the projects, with one receiving multiple inquiries.

Art Center Ranked Among the Best of the Best by DesignIntelligence’s Annual Survey

An Art Center student hard at work at a recent DesignStorm.

Cited as a “heavyweight player,” Art Center College of Design was once again ranked first for its undergraduate industrial design programs by the Design Futures Council in its annual DesignIntelligence survey of America’s Best Architecture and Design Schools, which recognizes the schools that are best preparing students for success in their professions. This year, the College’s Graduate Industrial Design program ranked second, one spot away from first where it has placed five times out of the last seven years.

The sum total of Art Center’s undergraduate industrial design programs—Entertainment Design, Environmental Design, Product Design and Transportation Design—were most admired for their “resources, reputation and quality of education.”

In their assessment of industrial design skills, in which hiring firms deem the collegiate programs most strongly educating students in specific skill areas, Art Center ranked first place in the categories of “Communication,” “Computer Applications” and “Design.” The College also ranked in the top five in the areas of “Cross-Disciplinary Teamwork” and “Research and Theory,” which makes Art Center one of only two schools to place in all categories.

“These programs are graduating students who are able to tackle complex and difficult work, create and share knowledge, and invent new design solutions in their fields,” the survey said of the institutions which ranked in its annual survey. “Students learn not just technologies and craft but also leadership, judgment, and insight into changing contexts and upcoming challenges. These will be our future leaders.”

The Design Futures Council is an independent and interdisciplinary network of design, product, construction leaders exploring global trends, challenges and opportunities to advance innovation and shape the future of our industry and environment.

Keepin’ It “Real Steel” with Tim Flattery’s Robots

Tim Flattery's Midas robot in Dreamworks' "Real Steel."

With all the negative attention that concussions in boxing, football and hockey have been getting lately, the scenario presented in Dreamworks’ film Real Steel, out in theaters today, doesn’t seem too far-fetched: In the year 2020, eight-feet-tall, 2,000 lb. robots have replaced humans as the pugilists du jour.

The film tells the story of a washed-up-boxer-turned-small-time-promoter (X-Men’s Hugh Jackman) who teams up with his estranged son (Resurrecting the Champ’s Dakota Goyo) to build and train a World Robot Boxing championship contender.

Tim Flattery, the chair of Art Center’s Entertainment Design program whom we interviewed in the most recent issue of Dot, designed several of the robotic brawlers featured in the film–Spitfire, Albino, Axelrod, Twin Cities and Midas.

“These aren’t your typical robots,” said Flattery of the characters he designed while working in close collaboration with Tom Meyer, the film’s production designer, and three other concept artists, including fellow Art Center faculty member Daren Dochterman. “They’re all very stylized and ridiculous, yet somehow, in the world of the movie they make sense.”

Head past the break for the trailer and an exclusive slideshow of designs by Flattery.

Continue reading →

July 12: Apparel Design with Justine Parish

Meet Product and Entertainment Design instructor Justine Limpus Parish at the Library on July 12 at 2:30 p.m.

Parish is an illustrator, designer, educator and author. She designs special occasion clothing collection, published her own textbook, Drawing the Fashion Body, and is a regular contributing writer and illustrator for Belle Armoire Magazine. She served as art director for Liberty House of California, and created the fashion department at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, serving as its first department chair.

She’ll be sharing her sources for costume and fashion research, giving an update on this fall’s design runway, and discuss apparel design at Art Center.

Don’t miss it!

Apparel Design with Justine Parish
Tuesday, July 12, 2:30 p.m.
Art Center Library, Hillside Campus

More from Syd Mead on Sentury II

Legendary visual futurist and Art Center alumnus Syd Mead stopped by Art Center last month as part of the Design Studio Press Spring Lecture Series.

Mead and his "Blade Runner" Spinner vehicle.

His lecture traversed the history of automobile design, the future of transportation, his early work for Ford and U.S. Steel, his work on Blade Runner and his latest book Sentury II.

We followed up with the designer via email to ask him about Sentury II.

Dotted Line: You mentioned in your lecture that the cover of Sentury II is intended to look like a metallic artifact that might be found in the future. What’s happening in the scene depicted in the artifact?
Mead: On the left of the spine of the book is a series of manifolds, circuitry and panels that simulate the energy feed to the image coherent side at the right (the actual cover of the book). I show a stylized, ceremonial figure just to the right of the book spine (the center of the overall artwork) and a horizontal split that reveals an energy source (heat? photon glow?) from behind the front surface of the plate combination.

At far right, just above the glowing energy source horizontal is a tableaux of figures and fixtures. One figure is entering a vehicle of some sort while behind him are a series of figures depicting a montage of social interaction, stylized foliage and geometric alignments that eventually go parallel to the outer edge of the ‘artifact.’

I imagined that this entire piece might have been dug up, cleaned off and somehow energized to bring the overall surface detail into view. The overall look of the cover art is a deliberate homage to the cover of Sentury II, which I painted first.

The cover of Sentury II

Continue reading →

Syd Mead: “The Future Starts Right Now”

Legendary visual futurist and Art Center alumnus Syd Mead stopped by Art Center’s Ahmanson Auditorium last week as part of the Design Studio Press Spring Lecture Series.


Syd Mead signing "Sentury II."

The always entertaining Mead delivered a presentation to a packed house whose attendees included The Lord of the Rings visual effects director Paul Lasaine, Megamind concept artist Samuel Michlap and Tron: Legacy vehicle designer Daniel Simon.

Mead’s lecture traversed the history of the automobile (“My total contribution to Americana automobilia is the taillight of the Ford Falcoln Futura.”), the future of transportation (“Antigravity is the answer for designers who don’t like to draw wheels.”) and his favorite color (“Cherenkov radiation blue, a fascinating optical phenomenon.”).

He also touched on Blade Runner, his early work for Ford and U.S. Steel, his latest book Sentury II and why the future is so difficult to predict.

Here are some highlights from his presentation.

On creative control:

The idea of controlling your creative idea right to the final format? That will never happen. Or rarely. Your ideas will go through a series of committees, compromises and pummels every single time.

On doing things by hand:

I learned how to hand-letter at Art Center, and that was very good training for drawing perfect ellipses. I still use gouache, which is putting paint on cardboard with animal hairs at the end of a stick. I know that’s not very romantic, but it works. All of today’s rendering software and code is made deliberately to mimic the hand-drawn technique.

Continue reading →

Flattery Named Chair of Entertainment Design

Concept artist, designer and educator Tim Flattery has been named Chair of Art Center’s Entertainment Design Department.

Flattery

Most think of Entertainment Design as how films come to look the way they do. Yet today, the field is much greater, encompassing any project in which storytelling is important—themed environments, exhibitions, gaming and learning institutions such as museums and libraries.

“For 24 years, I’ve worked in the entertainment industry and have been fortunate enough to have realized my dreams,” Flattery says. “As Chair of Entertainment Design at Art Center, I hope my passion and expertise will influence the next generation of talented designers so that they, too, can realize their dreams.”

Flattery is a multi-talented creative concept artist and designer with expertise in concept development, design and fabrication. In a career spanning more than two decades, he has worked on some of the biggest films for some of the most famous directors in the world. Among the number of highly anticipated projects he has worked on are Green Lantern, Real Steel, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Mission: Impossible IV.

He has overseen the full-size construction of custom vehicles, which he designed for films such as the Fantasticar for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, the Batmobile for Batman Forever, and the Amphibicopter and other vehicles for A.I. Artificial Intelligence. He has raised the creative bar with acclaimed design work on award-winning and blockbuster films, including Terminator Salvation, The Incredible Hulk, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Spider-Man II, Saving Private Ryan, Men in Black and many others. Beyond his career as a concept artist and illustrator in the film industry, Flattery has done creative work for Walt Disney Imagineering and Chimera Design in the area of theme parks and resorts. He has also done worked independently for Entertainment Arts and the EA Games Label.

This appointment represents a homecoming of sorts for Flattery, who taught visual communication at Art Center to industrial design students in the early ’90s. He received a Teacher of the Year award from the College in 1994. Flattery graduated from College for Creative Studies with a bachelor’s degree in Transportation Design.