The Graphics genius behind OBLIVION's HUD Animation (SPOILER ALERT)

Bradley Munkowitz (Known as DMUNK to his design colleagues) is the creative genius behind the amazing after effects animation in OBLIVION, which as you might know features the legendary Tom Cruise as a unsuspecting clone of himself who realizes that his world ti not what it seems and the aliens he thinks he thinks he is protecting humanity from have actually already taken over humanity, yeah, its complicated.

This artcile will not just be me babbling on about a movie but rather showing you an interview that was done between AWN's reporter Dan Sarto and DMUNK himself, as well as the guy who makes all of DMUNK's animations really come to life in the aniamtion studio. Enjoy.

Dan Sarto: Tell me a bit about the scope of your design and animation work on Oblivion.

Bradley Munkowitz: The interface designs we did on Oblivion were a two-phased project. The first phase was doing the light table graphics for the Sky Tower, which was needed for onset playback. We designed for four screens that were played back on 45 inch monitors embedded in a table. We had to get our work done and rendered to be available for onset playback so they could film the graphics in-camera. There wasn’t a lot of post work done on those graphics. It was mostly done in-camera. That was about a two and a half month gig for the design and animation with a team of three.

We chilled for a while. The film crew went and shot in Iceland and on a stage in Baton Rouge. Then, the second wave of work was with a team of four for all the post work, which included the HUD for the bubble ship, which appeared in around 50 shots. We also did gun reticles, drone reticles, binoculars, some motorcycle UI and a drone diagnostic device. That was a three to four month gig.

We made a really dope rad skull for the Radiation Zone UI but they didn’t use it, which was a big bummer. Our biggest disappointment in the gig was that they used an exclamation point within a triangle rather than our dope polygonal skull that Alexander designed.

Navarro Parker: My job was mostly animating, bringing to life Bradley’s amazing designs. We’d discuss his vision for a particular interface, what it was supposed to look like and how it was supposed to work. We’d break it down, do some animation tests, show them to the director [Joseph Kosinski] and go back and forth from there. Our primary tool was After Effects.

BM: Navarro was lead animator. I was the design director and lead designer. I designed all the interfaces with Chanimal [Joseph Chanimal], Jake Sargeant and Alexander Perry, who also did animation. Our team was usually four, sometimes five people, a little Seal Team as Joe liked to call us.

DS: From a design standpoint, who did you interface with on the main crew? Where did you fit within the visual development process for these interface designs?

BM: The beauty of the project and the reason why we were so efficient was that we basically went right to the director. There was nobody telling us anything except for Joe. That made it very easy. I ran the team. We’re four guys, we’re all friends and we love each other. Very loose, very open, very collaborative, very Zen in a lot of ways. We worked inside Joe’s production office. We were collaborating with the VFX editors, sometimes the set and prop designers. Mostly, it was just us and Joe working in tandem.

A lot of times you work on these movie gigs and the director is not very accessible. He comes with an entourage. You have a lot of meetings. It’s more “official” and a little more intense to be honest. But with Joe, it was very causal, very open. That’s why it was easier to do the ton of work we did.

It’s funny. When we were doing the work, it never seemed that intense. It never got that hairy. Everyone kept a really fresh attitude the entire time. But looking back on it, man, we did a lot of work!

DS: Kosinski is known for his design expertise and vision. What directives did he provide? Were you working off any previs, or other people’s design work? Did you create all the designs from scratch?

BM: Joe would sit down at our desks and sketch on a pad of paper, or he would relay what he wanted verbally to us. We didn’t have any other people or department’s designs to work from. The only thing we got from the art department was, for example, the size of the bubble ship glass.

NP: Joe had a concept for this film. He’d just come off of Tron: Legacy, which was all 3D and holograms. A very dense kind of look. On Oblivion, he wanted to do something 180 degrees from that. He wanted something simpler, more elegant.

BM: Tron was all about three dimensional holograms. Oblivion was all about elegant user interfaces of the future. On Tron, we didn’t do much UI work but on what we did, it was all weird, dataviz type 3D holograms, which was really fun.

I would love to do one more. Anyone who knows me knows I’d like to do one more, kind of like a swan song, reach out to all the ninjas out there and do a farewell to movie UI.

The ultimate quest is to crush Iron Man 2. Everybody knows it. That, in my eyes, still remains the best UI work in film ever done. They crushed it. It will probably never been equaled because the team that did that has been disassembled. It was all the top dudes working together at Prologue at one particular point in time. Every single member of the team that did Iron Man 2 has gone off to different places now. I’d want to grab all these great artists and just fucking kill it [laughs].