https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tzpvLekXy6U
So what I see with this particular church, which is so impressive, is they’re investing in the things that the congregation are witnessing close up, you know, so it’s like the, you know, the treasure binding of the gospel, they’ve got the icons, obviously, and the chalice, you know, and then they’ve got the candelabras and pretty much that’s it, or, you know, they’re probably going to be flowers, and their icons are just on a couple of easels, but they’ve draped them in some beautiful fabric, and again, I just love that because it’s economy and it’s focus and it’s really putting the resources where they should be, and kind of traveling around in England and going to churches in other denominations, what I see is just, you know, in some ways they have more resources, but there isn’t the same focus, you know, it might all be fundraising for the the Vestry roof or something, which I know these practical problems exist, and we need to, we need to address them, but also it’s like, but where is the priority? And, you know, it’s, I really wanted to, if anyone’s listening, appeal to people, please engage artists and designers in your church, because design is happening, whether you like it or not, you know, I think you’ve talked about this Jonathan, but you can’t avoid design, it’s going to work on your congregation anyway, so use it consciously. This is Jonathan Pageau, welcome to the symbolic world. Hello everyone, I am very happy to be here with Heather Paulington. You’ve been following me for a while, you’ve heard me drop her name a few times. Heather is a designer, she has worked on several projects, very large movies that you’ve heard about, and we’ve been collaborating now for several months, she redid my whole branding, you can see the great new Symbolic World logo, the Symbolic World website, you know, just beautiful work that she has produced for me, but I thought it would be really interesting to discuss with her and look at her process, how she comes to her ideas, to her designs, how she takes a movie story and is able to create images and designs and sets based on that, so Heather, it’s really great to have you with me today. Hi, thanks for inviting me. So my first question to you is, how does one end up doing the things you’re doing, because it’s very particular. It is very particular, so I studied similar time to you at art school as a fine artist, and I think pretty quickly I realised that the sort of contemporary fine art world wasn’t really for me, and I was interested in film making process particularly, and I was lucky because at that time in Britain, the film world was kind of exploding because of the Harry Potter movies, and I was lucky enough to get my kind of entry-level role on the Harry Potter series, and that’s where I learned the craft really, with some of the best people in the world working at that time, the sets were very detailed, and that’s really where I started out, and today I’m just going to take you through some of the films I’ve worked on, and kind of how we go about designing for films. For the last 20 years, my role has been sort of graphic artist, graphic designer, which means within the film art department, I’m responsible for anything that has like a graphic design illustrative element. It could be like, it might be a book, it might be branding within a film, you know, like sort of branding for a Bond villains company, it could be a monogram for a medieval king, for example, so it’s really varied, it depends what film you’re on, different periods, and you really have to learn the language of that film right at the offset, and then you could start creating things in that language, and the languages are quite complex, which you’ll see because from the outset people think, you know, it’s a medieval film, but really that could mean hundreds of different things, so you’re taking your cues from the director about what do we mean, what is the world we’re creating, and it’s always driven by the story, the story we’re trying to tell, and we’re setting it within that kind of term, so we’ll go through, but first I want to say that before I show you things, when I discovered your channel, like so much of what you talked about resonated with me, because there’s a lot of similarities to the way that we work in film, I mean we sort of work in the symbolic world generally, and also it’s a world of visual hierarchies, and so a lot of the stuff you talked about with hierarchy really kind of chimed, and I’m going to kind of look at it through that lens, because I thought it’d be interesting for your list. Yeah, because like you said, in some ways the idea of making a medieval film, it’s not just about making something medieval, it’s to make it medieval within the purpose of the story itself, and so the sets and the images have to supplement or, you know, help the story, it’s not just about showing a medieval castle, right, or showing some medieval tapestry or whatever. Well, exactly, so you know, what is the medieval world? It can be a hundred different things, so we have to decide what it is that we’re saying, and I’m going to also talk about the difference between history and story, what you’ll find if you go on IMDB, you’ll have a lot of experts saying, you know, this is historically inaccurate, which in some cases is true, and mistakes get made, but quite often people will purposefully break with history in order to prioritise story, so we’re going to have a look at that as well. So I’ll just, shall I just share my screen? This is a diagram of the sort of hierarchy of props on the film set, and I’ve noticed, I’ve listened to a lot of discussions that you’ve had about perception and how we sort of experience the world and how, you know, people that we know or things we care about will appear to us in detail, and things that we maybe aren’t aware of, even though they’re in front of us, we don’t really see them, and actually that idea is formalised in the filmmaking process, so if you go onto a film set, we have a way of categorising props, so hero prop would be, it’s held by the actor, it has a specific purpose to tell a story, it’s likely to be in close-up, it might be in close-up with the actor, or it could even be an insert shot where literally your prop is the whole screen of the movie, and that hero prop will contain lots of detail for the story, it might be a moment where you suddenly, you know, something is revealed in this image or this prop, so it’s very important, a lot of time and energy is spent into getting those things right, directors really care about them, because obviously if they don’t work, then the audience doesn’t understand what’s going on, and technically a hero prop will, it’s normally made for real, so if we’re making like a medieval book, it will be made properly in leather with proper metal work, the interior will be parchment, it might be hand painted, we will use real gold leaf, that sort of thing, that level of detail, and then as you go down this hierarchy to what’s dressing, then background, and then deep background, that process kind to an extent deteriorates, so if you’re looking at deep background props that may be four metres from the camera, really it’s probably not going to be the real thing, it’s going to be something that looks like the real thing, you know, we’re going to spend a little bit less attention, a little bit less time on that thing, so this is all very important, because when you have film budgets, you really have to put that money into the right things that you’re getting value from on screen. You can see how it’s a contraction of our experience, because like you said, the problem is that you have a limited amount of resources, obviously you don’t have infinite resources, and just that very fact, and the fact that you have to create attention with a limited amount of resources, therefore a hierarchy will immediately get set up, because you have to decide what’s more important and what’s less important, and that will have to do with attention in terms of a movie for sure. Absolutely, because we have very tight deadlines, so we have to decide, you know, where are we going to put our energy, and what’s going to be seen on screen, and you know, how are the audience going to read what we’re doing, so that’s all really inbuilt to our process. And it’s interesting, because when you see, actually when you think of movies where the resources became near infinite, then all of a sudden everything becomes flat, to those movies and those stories, I’m thinking of how after Lord of the Rings, which was so amazing, Peter Jackson just got like infinite amount of resources to make King Kong, and then you’re just like, your eyes are straining to watch King Kong fight one more dinosaur, and just like millions of details that won’t stop, you know, as the very limited resources forces a proper hierarchy. It’s so interesting you say that, because it is a problem, and it’s something we’re going to kind of find out as we go through this. So I would say, yeah, in the last 10 years, there’s sort of been a diminishment of hierarchy in film. Two things, as you say, unlimited budgets almost, and you know, obviously CG, which is kind of limitless, and in a way it’s compromised the craft. And if you watch older films, you know, that are more limited technically, you’ll see more, just better storytelling, you know, it’s difficult to describe. But it has to do with hierarchy definitely, because what ends up happening is not just even in what you’re doing, it’s not just hierarchy of objects, but it ends up being a kind of hierarchy of motion and a hierarchy of action, right? You know, in an older movie, your action scene costs you so much to make and was so demanding that you had to really make it dramatically relevant and dramatically constructed. And now it’s like you just watch CGI characters fight for 15 minutes, and it’s so boring, because there’s no stakes, right? There’s no stakes in the people who make it. Yeah, it’s like the crew aren’t invested, and then as a viewer, neither are you. Anyway, so I’m just going to go through these images. So this is, it seems like stating the obvious, but I want to do that just in case people aren’t aware that most of the films I work on, they really do start like this. It’s basically a warehouse, and then we build everything. So you’re going to build the walls, and then you’re going to get the interior decoration, and then every single prop is going to be brought into that space. This is the bond stage at Pinewich, which I’ve done a few sets, and I worked for an amazing designer called Dennis Gassner, and he was kind of my mentor early on in my career, and he said, you know, the story has to be in every single thing that we do. So when we stood there, we’re, you know, we’re bringing all these things in, and we have to decide, like, you know, if there’s three different knives or three different logos, we have to decide which one it is. And so our point is, which one is best for the story? And that applies to everything, you know, even like down to the paper choice that I make. So in that case, if I was doing like an MI6 office for James Bond, you know, even though you’re not going to see it, we would still think about the paper that they have in that office, you know, that would be a choice. And it’s easier to have those limitations, because like you say, otherwise, it’s just a million choices. So we have that as our kind of guiding rule. I just want to say as well that all of these images, I produce them in a team. So there’s lots of people that I’ve worked with over the years, and especially my job share partner, Cathy, who’s been part of this process. So I just want to mention them, because there’s too many to name as I go through. So this is where I started out. This is Harry Potter. As you can see in these two images from the film, there’s a lot of documents and a lot of books. And I started off really doing very background props. And what you need in that case is a lot of quantity and a lot of texture. So as I was explaining before, how we deal with props in terms of a hierarchy, you can see on the image in the right, where Harry is sat, here you have real books. And then here, which is a few metres away from the camera, these are fake. And I spent about six months of my career at the beginning just making these books. And you can’t open them. But again, they totally served the purpose. We had to fill the whole library with hundreds of books. So you start off doing that when you’re at the bottom. And then in about 2007, I got a lucky break and went out to Budapest to work for Guillermo del Toro and Hellboy 2. And at that point, I was running the department. And then I’m responsible for all the graphic props. So everything from the hero things like these, where you’ve got maps, storytelling maps. And then also I’m doing background things. But the background things do have a lot of detail. So for example, this was the map room in this kind of underground realm called the troll market. And we had to develop a language for that world. And then all of these little tags that you see, they have the troll language stamped on them. And all of these maps, me and my assistant Alex, we drew all of those maps. They’re just hanging in the background, but they’re all our own work. So you can see just the amount of detail that goes in. And people think, well, why would you do that? Why not just go and get any old map? But in this case, if you’re in a fantasy world, you can’t get anything from the real world. So you’ve really got to make it. And it’s so funny that for people watching, when Heather contacted me and she said that she had made these props on Hellboy 2, I specifically remember watching Hellboy 2 and being and realizing the difference between Hellboy 2 and a lot of the other movies that I’d seen in terms of the attention to detail. And also at the time, I was already interested in medieval aesthetics and more ancient aesthetics. And I thought, like, oh, they got this right. They got so many things right in terms of that. So I have to say, I want to tell everybody, if you haven’t seen Hellboy 2, just visually, just for the visuals, it is worth watching. It’s pretty astounding. This is one of the hero props from Hellboy 2. And this, pretty much early in my career, being given this was pretty amazing because it’s right in the first scene. And Professor Broom has this book and it basically introduces the whole world of the Golden Army and they use it as a portal for an animation. So it’s in close up. So this is one of the examples. This is my visual, which I just drew in a computer on the left. But then it did, you know, get made by some bookbinders in Budapest in leather and everything. And I think it was interesting because I knew we were sort of in the medieval world, but you can tell by looking at it, you know, the colors are pretty lurid. It’s definitely in the world of fantasy. It’s got a robot in the middle. But it’s something, some really valuable thing that I learned from Guillermo is about kind of style and color. You know, one thing he said was Hellboy is red and therefore everything in the movie is pretty much green and blue because you always want Hellboy to be the focus. So, again, just to explain that what I do is never like about an individual object or me. It’s always complimentary. It’s always part of the drama that we’re creating. And so you have to have all those considerations in place when you’re designing stuff. But there’s such a sensibility. Go back to the one before, like if you look at the little tree that you designed there on the left, the little kind of symbolic tree there. I mean, it has it really has it has an understanding of how to make a symbolic tree, but it doesn’t look like any other one that I’ve seen before. And so that’s why it really works in terms of a fantasy movie that’s also related. It’s like it’s related to our history because it’s as if there’s a secret history kind of going through our normal history. And that’s what it feels like when you see it. It’s like, oh, that’s it. Obviously, that’s like a tree that I could see in an old design or like Islamic art. I’m not sure, but it looks like that, but it’s not quite that. It’s interesting you picks up on that because I actually didn’t draw that tree. So I got that from Guillermo. I think it was a piece from the concept art that I had to integrate. So that can happen quite a lot. Again, this process is massively collaborative. And, you know, there’s a lot of people involved. So sometimes you’ll get given something. So that was the only thing I got. And then I developed the book around it. But like you say, there was already a good language in there that I could use and kind of extend out. But you can see that the lettering around the outside, that’s like a kind of bespoke alphabet that we developed in our department. So these are some of the other bits and bobs from Hellboy 2 that I did. You can see there’s quite a few here. There’s a lot of hero props in that film. This one, you know, it’s just an incidental hotel sign where this creature kind of rips off the air. So it can be something as boring as that that you have to design. Here you can see Hellboy stood in front of a, it was supposed to be under Brooklyn Bridge and we built the whole thing in Budapest. And we had to do all the storefronts. So again, you’re kind of, you’re trying to reference like contemporary New York, but at the same time, you know, you’re in the comic book world. So everything is like exaggerated, oversized. I did this, I don’t know if you can see it, I did like Daddy O’s Garage because we were referencing like sort of 50s comic book Americana. So yeah, it’s really a world of its own and you have to really get into that and think, you know, beyond the script really. So after that I did a couple of the Bond films and these are kind of interesting because you might look at this image and think, you know, it’s pretty boring, but it’s actually one of the most interesting films. And the reason is, working with Sam Mendes, he was telling a story about London in 2012, MI6 got blown up and the MI6 team went into a bunker. So what he’s doing there is he’s tapping into something for the kind of, at least the British audience, you know, about the Second World War. It’s the narrative of kind of you know, Bond being out of date, you know. So when I talked to him about what does this office look like, he wanted me to produce this file here and it’s purposefully very kind of old-fashioned. It’s almost 1990s, you know, we’re in 2012, the likelihood is things would be digital, but again, you would select in terms of story that you would go towards the old-fashioned, towards the manual in order to create a certain narrative about the world that bonds in. And what I’m seeing at the moment in film, I don’t know about you, Jonathan, but particularly in medieval films, there’s just constant innovation. People always want to do something new visually and the problem is sometimes we need to be conservative in design. Now in the case of Skyfall, he is in London and you see the world that he’s in in MI6 and then he travels to Shanghai and this is an animated jellyfish that he encounters and there’s a fight scene. So compared to the world we’ve come from, this world is very technologically advanced, it’s alienating, it’s strange, you’ve got this blue light and so what Sam’s doing is he’s got these two contrasts, but what I’m seeing is when people want to inject kind of strange elements everywhere, that’s kind of falling away. So I’ll give you an example, if you saw the Green Knight film, so that film, there was a lot that I admired about the design, I thought it was really interesting but after I’d finished watching it, I was like there’s something about that film that I can’t figure out that didn’t quite work for me and I was reading Gawain and the Green Knight with my daughter and it was just like an old 70s book with watercolours and it started off saying the opening thing was like we’re in Camelot, everyone sat around the fire, okay you’re in the home state and then suddenly this green knight comes in on horseback which is completely strange right and so there’s a dramatic impact there because you have a conservative setting that is home and then the strangeness comes into that, but the problem with that film is that the setting of the round table was already alienating, it’s already strange, it was like medievalism meets Star Wars, if you know what I mean, there was a globalist element to it, so as we went in I was like wow, some you know these visuals are stunning but when the Green Knight came in it just felt like more of the same so I feel like it’s something that is there and I just wanted to show when it’s done well it really does work in terms of story and this is something that when I talk to people who go to films, they don’t necessarily, they can’t really articulate what the problem is but they know if something just didn’t quite work or they’re just like oh you know I don’t really get the story or whatever so. Yeah it just didn’t land, you ask the person you know if why didn’t you like it or did you like it and they don’t know why, they just know that. They usually just say well you know yeah it wasn’t that great or whatever but I’m seeing more and more now I’m aware of this thing, it’s one of the reasons why that people need to be restrained sometimes I think in terms of how much they’re innovating. Yeah and when I see the two images you showed, the one of MI6 in the bunker, then I realize that using arches you know because you wouldn’t have, you wouldn’t have had to use arches but using arches and brick and you know kind of that aesthetic is perfect for the contrast with this kind of high-tech world. Yeah and it does, not only does it look like a bunker but it looks old, like it looks like an old basement from a you know a 17th century building or something. Yeah and it’s built you know again that’s not a location, that was all done purposefully, it was really clever. Yeah. So I’ve just kind of made this point about the primacy of story over reality and I just wanted to share this example with you and a lady that does the same job as me called Annie Atkins, she’s got a great Instagram and she pulled up this example and it refers to Titanic so when Rose arrives in New York on a lifeboat, she looks out at a green Statue of Liberty in 1912, the statue would have not been fully oxidized and should have been a copper color and she shows this postcard from 1912 about a copper statue. So if the director showed a copper Statue of Liberty, the audience would would go why is that brown? Yeah. Because their frame of reference is that it’s green, whereas if it’s green what the audience feels is home you know or America or whatever it is, so that’s what we want, we’re always going for the emotion with the audience and you know small historical details like that, although it will annoy people it’s less important when you’re making a film. That’s a great example to help you understand like you said the primacy of story and you know people will get annoyed maybe with me but I think that’s something that happens in traditional stories all the time and even possibly in the Bible story that is especially with time certain details get contracted in a manner to make sure that they communicate to the largest amount of people what has to be communicated and so there’s a need to because if it if that doesn’t happen then idiosyncrasy is idiosyncrasy and you don’t have the same level of it the same kind of attention to something strange and idiosyncratic than you do to something like you said that feels familiar and so the example of the statue is a great one to help people understand. Yeah it’s really good and you’re absolutely right so we’re going to get on to some medieval things in a minute but what I would say is you know say you’re doing a medieval film you can only really use examples that are going to be within the experience of your audience because if you pull something up from the 13th century that is no longer recognised it’s not going to work like no one knows what that is and like you say it’s jarring because they’re like you know what’s that thing in the background so yeah unless that’s what you want to do unless you want to create a otherworldly an otherworldly effect like that’s what I kept thinking about if I made a film in the middle ages I would I would write it and I would make it in a way that would make the the the middle ages look like almost like a how can I say this like a paradise right which would be surprising to people because they’re used to make to making it look like dirty disgusting you know place and so it’s like that that surprise would be used in the story it’s like why why is everything so like gold and colourful and and you know so that but you would have to put it in the story if it’s just background it’s not worth it it’s not worth the effort definitely not I mean we’ve talked about that haven’t we the the kind of the recent trend for making everything in the medieval world kind of brown and but I’ve kind of pondered on why that is and this is my hunch about it I think it’s to do with you know the western world’s slight discomfort with its past and particularly its christian past because what I’ve seen on set is if there’s something like a prop that people are not pleased with they’ll get a prop guy to come and and spray brown over it it’s how I’ve seen it happen loads of times they go I’ll just dirty that down because they just want it to kind of to fade into the background fade into the background exactly and what you see now in in medieval films is that that’s happening on mass that the whole thing has gone brown and it’s like you know if you look at like heraldic language for example is so brightly coloured and powerful you know and that’s how it would have been in the medieval world I’m talking now about historical yeah yeah but so but the effect like it would be interesting because the effect of walking into Saint-Chapelle I was there you know in Paris this a few weeks ago with my kids and they had never been you know they’d never seen it and I was like getting them all I was getting ready to watch their eyes when they would walk into the church and just see the red and the blue and the gold and just you know all the it’s just so it’s just so overwhelming and so you know it’s interesting it’d be interesting to think of that dramatically in terms of in terms of storytelling like how how could we change people’s perception of the middle ages in the story by creating that same if surprise that you have when you walk into oh definitely I’ve thought about that many times um okay I’m gonna carry on yeah so this would this is like a hero prop for mary poppins so this is just an example from my work of the amount of things that you might have to think about if you’re creating something like this so story is here and the banks family have a certificate and even though mary poppins returns is set in the 1930s the certificate dates back to the 1910 1910 even and so I had to create this so basically looking at um design of certificates and then you have to go into the whole history of the banking industry where would it have been based when would it have been established what was the currency at the time figuring out the address and all the details signatories things like that as well as I can get the typography so even though it’s just a bit of ephemera in a film again if it’s wrong you’re aware that people are going to kind of you know screen grab it on the internet and then go on imdb and tell you where you’re wrong but this is this was the world of mary poppins returns that I worked on and I put this in because again it’s it’s not just about worlds that you create in this case it’s definitely about memory it’s like you’re dealing with a very iconic character that is very precious to lots of people so when you come onto a film like this it’s not like oh you know amazing creative opportunities although they may come it’s more I have a huge responsibility to kind of preserve this this world and you know so that the people who love it you know don’t get disappointed so we’re looking at 1930s London here but it’s all definitely through the lens of the the world of mary poppins so you can see you know lots of pastel colors it’s it’s it’s um um it’s it’s pretty light you know these I had to replicate these um blocks these iconic blocks from the first movie um and then this in that film was the world of the villain which was in the bank so it was like bank signage carpets um account ledger and there’s the certificate there kind of set within the mary poppins kite and that’s part of the story there and and so to the medieval world we’re just talking about so this is a classic example it’s um maleficent 2 um and I was really pleased to be um asked to do this film because the designer wanted to do a brightly colored version of the medieval world that was very much referencing um the world of disney and I absolutely love early disney I love the the sleeping beauty from 1959 um so obviously you look you’re looking at the original sleeping beauty cartoon but because I have to make uh like real world examples my approach was right I’m going to go into medieval art kind of late gothic um maybe kind of 1415 15th century and I’m going to try and find examples of at disney and on the right hand side here you can see just a couple of my references and and you know it’s interesting to see that they do exist um you know this image here which is from 1470 you know it could be from an animation it’s it’s so stylized so you’re looking for overlaps there that are going to kind of um you know tick boxes in both worlds if you like this is um Michelle Pfeiffer in front of one of my tapestries so this would be a example of a deep background prop you’re never going to see it up close she’s about four meters away from it and and it’s complementing the drama she’s here um like practicing her crossbow shot and so what we’ve got in the background is um I did about 12 of them a tapestry where um a mythical creature is having its horn removed and some of the others were like mythical creatures being killed that was the narrative that she was waging war on the mythical world yeah yeah so you’re going to use color like obviously you’ve got the red that’s really obvious and you’ve got the um the unicorn with its horn snapped and then I used for this in this case quite a graphic style of tapestry that was a bit earlier um than the 15th century because I knew it was deep background and if it was going to register in any way it needed to be um you know quite graphic and obvious yeah and it reads I mean I think that it for people it also reads so right because we most people that have seen medieval art have seen the the unicorn tapestries that you know that exist that some I think some are in New York and then some are yeah I looked at those yeah definitely yeah it’s interesting because I read about the original animators at Disney and they all went to look at those tapestries oh yeah so they based the animation on the tapestries and then I was here designing tapestries that were referencing the animation so there’s a kind of a nice kind of circular connection there um but yeah the other thing to consider is the costume you know she’s there in a white dress so if I’d done a light tapestry wouldn’t work so have to do something where you know it’s going to complement what she’s wearing um this is a set from Maleficent 2 this is um with studio lights on so this is how you’ll never see it in the film but I’m showing it you like this so you can see all the details so basically my department would we’re responsible for this huge carpet 40 foot uh kind of persian style heraldic carpet we were doing flags we were doing banners we’re doing chair backs um plates all sorts it was like a banqueting sequence so we would um have all these elements made bespoke um for the sets um and this is a close-up of the carpet so um you know the car if something’s on the floor it’s not just deep background it’s not even on the same plane as your camera really right the camera’s going this way and the carpet’s here so a lot of people will just say you know it doesn’t matter just you know do something do something quick and easy and but I really wanted to draw this as a bit of a challenge so I drew this in a computer we printed it on onto velvet um and I think at this point you’re really creating something for the crew and the actors it’s like I said it’s it’s not really going to register on screen but what what’s lovely is if actors and crew come onto a set and they see the amount of effort that different departments have put in you know to different things and um you know it’s good for the project if if people invest time and detail I think so the idea is that you the animals are all being caught like they’re all changed yeah yeah that’s right um yeah so yeah sorry this um I used a heraldic language because we’re in a kind of public space and we wanted we wanted to make the point that you know in the narrative the queen is kind of capturing the mythical creatures maleficent comes in and it’s supposed to be a quite a hostile environment so um I was depicting these animals you know with chains which again is is kind of we’ve seen all this in in heraldry so again you kind of select from heraldry the thing that suits your story um and uh I’ll zoom in on it if I can you can just see oh yeah like how many how many little pieces there um so and this is this is the scene with that carpet so you can see really how much is registering not not much yeah you know the other element of what we do is you can make something and then the lighting department could come along and you know completely change the way that something looks um but you know it’s I still really enjoyed doing it and it was it was a great thing to draw yeah like you said the the the energy and the the basic the basic effort reads you know it you can you can feel the richness of the of the texture and the space so it definitely adds it’s the picture of me with another tapestry from that film so we’re in a um in a bedroom space so it’s more intimate it’s you I went for a bit of a softer language because I knew um you know like I said it’s more private it’s more likely that the actors may be closer um and you can see that that’s it hung on the wall it’s obviously supposed to be like a heavyweight tapestry but you can see from that shot that it’s just a piece of white fabric with a digital print yeah so um what I have to do in this case is actually draw I have to put everything into the artwork because the technology of how it’s produced is not going to give me anything um and one of the most important things that I’ve learned doing this kind of work is how much technology um defines art um I think when I was like a fine artist I used to think that the artist was everything and you know you could just make whatever you wanted but things like tapestries are so driven by the technology so when I was drawing this I had to consider I had to look into you know what what were the limitations of the dyes for example you know if you think about the red tapestry I showed you before that’s earlier it’s probably because they had like more basic looms they had like thicker wool you know so the actual um the actual language was had to be kind of simpler and more graphic and then as you got to like the late 15th century things were more sophisticated um and so so you got like finer finer details finer illustration but they still only had like you know x amount of colors available and the challenge for someone like me who’s working on a computer is again just having infinite colors you know it’s a problem you have you have to limit yourself in order to make something that feels authentic um so you know sometimes when I’ve designed things I’m like it’s not quite right it’s probably because I’m not sticking to the rules of the limitation of that technology um and so in this you had to design even is I mean you had to design it so that it looked like it was woven I imagine yeah so yeah I mean I can show you some details of it so the way that it’s drawn is basically in tiny lines yeah okay um so you couldn’t draw like solid things I mean probably having this is probably the best yeah but you can you can see the way I’ve actually drawn in the woven lines in there um and yeah that again with with digital printing it’s something you have to do um this is a picture of it when it’s installed in the set um which again it doesn’t look like this in the film but um and this that’s I did that carpet as well so you know big consideration with this is where does the bed go where where is this um you know curtain going you’ve got to make the images fit around the architecture that’s very important um so but still you have the animals kind of the animals with their yeah yeah yeah so it’s a similar theme yeah it’s a similar theme to the one downstairs oh and just to say these trees here they were kind of inspired by the original um 1959 animation um and here it is in the film so you can see uh aurora and the queen and so the queen’s embracing her but it’s not genuine um and then you’ve got you know this is her dress is pink and then I’ve got a pink rose in the background because her name is bryarose and then obviously got this kind of chained um swan here yeah um which is obviously like a kind of reflection of the narrative and that’s I mean I think that for people it’s important to see in how subtle it is right because it and it won’t read consciously for people but you know when you add up all these very subtle connections in a in a story that’s when people get a kind of magical sense of coherence even though they’re not able to and that’s you know like some of the symbolism that I point out even like in bible stories or in myth or whatever uh you know the the the explicit links I point out are perceived by people implicitly people can perceive coherence they can perceive they can perceive analogical coherence even though they can’t explicate it they just know that the story is good and they remember it but they yeah so so like pointing it out is fun and it’s wonderful because it helps people see how these things are built but uh someone would watch the movie and get a sense of coherence without if you pointed it out like you said oh look at the same color of a dress and the rose and then the the swan in the background oh yeah okay that makes sense uh but they don’t even need to see it for it to work you’re absolutely right and whenever I meet people who’ve seen films I’ve worked on I never want them to have noticed my work because because if they’ve noticed it probably it’s probably a bad thing you know the what you want is just for people to come out and say I really enjoyed the movie you know that’s what you want and you don’t want them to say I like that tapestry in scene three because again it really shouldn’t be detracting from the actors for starters and secondly you don’t want that symbolism to be you know too overt because you know it’s too much and so yeah you like things kind of being hidden it’s nice to hear you say that you think they’re subtle because I always worry like is that too much but like you say I think most people watching it probably wouldn’t notice no but I definitely know I mean these are the things that I noticed but I think most artists would have more sensibility to seeing that like I said the work you did in Hellboy 2 I just remember because it was it seemed to me so rare that that this type of detail was included in movies that it just really stood out for me and the same I remember watching the Bond film and it’s and and the same just feeling like it was so well done I mean like everything was so beautiful not beautiful not beautiful in the sense of attractive but beautiful in the sense of appropriate like all the scenes that were appropriate yeah I think what you’re saying is usually due to having a really good director because there’s so many of us involved in the process if you have a director like Guillermo or Sam Mendes who really know what they’re doing they can really lead everyone in one direction and if everyone knows what they’re doing it’s great some some films I’ve worked on haven’t had that leadership and at that point everyone’s guessing and it can be you can imagine the results and well we’ve all seen like we’ve all you know and I hate to use specific examples but I will you know this recent series that this sees the series what it’s called the chosen the Jesus series you know okay it’s like it you can see that there’s no there’s no capacity to create coherent visual spaces right it’s like okay we need something that looks old we need something that looks oriental like so we just kind of put things in there and I and some of it is budget I totally understand and I sympathize with that but it affects your perception of the story when you you know when you you’re watching and there’s no there’s no sense of coherence and then compare that to for example watching Dune where it it’s not as if there’s massive amounts of story in Dune right it’s like it’s actually a pretty slow film but you’re just so mesmerized by the visual coherence of the story and the attention to detail that it just it traps you right you just keep watching because it’s so so powerfully yeah yeah it’s interesting you say that because I’ve come to the end of my film work now and I just wanted to chat to you about something which is kind of what how can we apply these these ideas in the wider world and I thought about them a lot in terms of churches and how churches are designed because of my background whenever I go into a church and I go into quite a lot here in England and I’m super sensitive to to the way things are designed and you know ornament patterns that you know they’re all transmitting information basically to me and I’ve recently started going to a new Romanian Orthodox mission church and I wanted to talk to you about it because they’re a new mission their circumstances are actually quite compromised they’re hiring a church from the Anglicans it’s it’s a big kind of 12th century Norman church on a hill usual kind of setting in an English village and they’re kind of coming in a few days a week and setting up that you know this this Orthodox mission but the way that they are they direct attention is absolutely masterful and I go in and watch it and a lot of the liturgy is in Romanian but it doesn’t matter because what they’re doing visually is so captivating and they basically do it with color and light and for me it’s just an example that we can all learn from of you actually don’t need the Hollywood budgets or you know the huge resources because they don’t actually have very much but with what they’ve got they’re just using it really cleverly and I think I’m happy to hear that by the way because there are so many churches that don’t do that especially in America and I have to say maybe closer to me than I wish where there’s a desire to go over the top because like almost to overcompensate for the lack of a good space and so it’s like you know buying ornaments at Home Depot and gluing them on plywood and then spray painting it with gold paint and you think man like you just do something simple it would be so much better right? Yeah so what I see with this particular church which is so impressive is they’re investing in the things that the congregation are witnessing close up you know so it’s like the treasure binding of the gospel they’ve got the icons obviously and the chalice you know and then they’ve got the candelabras and pretty much that’s it or you know they’re probably going to be flowers and their icons are just on a couple of easels but they’ve draped them in some beautiful fabric and again I just love that because it’s economy and it’s focus and it’s really putting the resources where they should be and kind of traveling around in England and going to churches in other denominations what I see is just you know in some ways they have more resources but there isn’t the same focus you know it might all be fundraising for the the Vestri roof or something which I know these practical problems exist and we need to we need to address them but also it’s like but where is the priority and you know it’s it’s I really wanted to if anyone’s listening appeal to people you know please please engage artists and designers in your church because design is happening whether you like it or not you know I think you’ve talked about this Jonathan but you know you can’t avoid design it’s going to work on your congregation anyway so use it consciously and it doesn’t matter you know whatever your expression of Christianity is it can be done on different levels but you have to take care of it you know it’s like the skyfall stuff you know it look it’s simple but it still needs thinking about yeah definitely yeah you I mean you can see the you know in terms of in terms of attention and design that it’s interesting to think about how especially as many churches move towards entertainment mode you know how the type of design they use ends up reflecting that and it’s almost accidental they don’t necessarily realize what’s going on they just want to make something interesting but the type of attention that you give to a concert and the type of attention you give to God is not the same attention and so the danger like the danger of going bling right and having light shows and smoke and all that stuff is that there is a type of attention the type that you talk about which is like a simple candle on a table and a you know a let’s say just a bit of light coming in from a high window that has a transforming effect that is that subtle but it has more to do with the type of transformation we need to to do in our in ourselves like the type of attention and transformation we need to to to have then you know being overwhelmed by a massive sound system and and and you know electric guitars absolutely yeah right um all right so now we’re gonna talk about all right and so this is this is this is very this is like a big deal to me because um you know i the symbolic world branding as some of you know i mean some people some people were very attached to it but it was it was done very rapidly and with a bunch of different people and and kind of chaotically in some ways and so although i did like the image of adam and eve uh there was something about it which was too much it was it was too much detail and everything so i’ve been thinking about the desire to i’ve been having the desire to create something more simple more encompassing in terms of um you know it’s weird like even this image the symbolic world you know i had these t-shirts printed i gave the t-shirt to one of my kids and they’re like well i’m not going to wear that dad there’s like naked people on the on the image and i thought wait oh yeah that’s true i didn’t even realize just how there’s there’s a little too much in there and so heather contacted me and said you know she liked the channel and that she if i if i would like she would help me to to kind of redesign some things and so i was i was super excited because i saw her work and so so we’re going to take you kind of through what our thinking was and what we wanted to do so all right you can you can go now heather this is this is exciting to me okay um right so the first thing to say is there was already a logo which is really important because um again there’s an expectation from your audience about what the symbolic world is like whatever you say about that logo it was established and so in very basic terms i had to think about like what is the atmosphere of the channel and from what i remember about your intros it was like a black world there was a kind of glittering goal thing um and it was there was quite a lot of dimension you know you’d done some quite cinematic stuff so you know the danger is if i came along with my ideas of like what i think you should do and design something like slick vector graphics like your audience basically switches on the day that it launches and they’re like where are we you know so so you have to honor in the same way you know with mary poppins or whatever you have to honor what what is it kind of in the hearts and minds of your audience already and what are they used to and so so you’re evolving something you’re not kind of starting from scratch you’re going here’s some elements that work let’s keep hold of them and let’s kind of build on them so if i look at this logo here actually i really liked it um the main problem looking at that technically for me is that all of the kind of identity and detail within the back image and the lettering um i don’t know i don’t know what how you did that but i didn’t do that that was the people who made my website who just like just put that okay so so there hadn’t been that much consideration not much consideration at all and you know that’s your title and it’s a really brilliant title the symbolic world is like okay so we really need to do something with the lettering and sort out the hierarchy because again problem is you’ve got thing in the forefront with no information really it’s a strange kind of 1980s white typeface and then the thing at the back has all the identity so we need to flip those around and so it’s just working better and so you came to me with this brief of uh norman cicely and the peridexion tree i can tell people a little bit that i just want to maybe tell people about the peridexion tree and why what i wanted to do with that because i know some people are looking at the new logo and wondering like what’s going on with the new logo so the peridexion tree is a medieval legend about a tree that exists in the east it’s a tree in india or somewhere mysteriously in the east and this tree is special because under the tree there’s a dragon that that just kind of hangs out under the tree and then there are doves that land in the branches of this tree and while the doves are in the shadow of the tree then the dragon won’t harm them you could even say that in some ways the dragon protects them because the dragon is scaring off any other predator for the tree but as soon as the as the dove leaves the the shadow of the tree then the dragon will eat the bird and so to me this was such a powerful image of symbolism it contained heaven and earth it contained this heavenly influence that comes down on the structure of of a pattern tree and then the monster at the at the bottom that is both a gargoyle but also the monster that will devour the the pattern if you’re not careful and you and you let these higher influences leave the shadow of the pattern and so it just seemed like a beautiful simple cosmic image that had a lot of visual potential to it as well yeah so it’s a complex thing i think um you know it was challenging in lots of respects because you have quite a long title and what you’ll usually see in brands is if you have a long title you have a very simple image or you’ll have a very complex image and a short title so i there was a lot to deal with here and it’s one of the things that um i struggled with initially but they so Norman’s history was amazing when you showed me that it was kind of mosaic so i was aware of and i’d really admired but i hadn’t looked into it deeply so i had the opportunity to do that you know studied all those amazing mosaics and knew there was like a lot of visual potential in those and these are like some of the first sketches that i did um and looking back now they’re like really over complicated and the main reason for that is that i was just too close to the reference what happens quite often with historic references that you kind of fall a bit in love with it and and then you’re too close to it um and also i had had a few iterations made even before we started working where there was a logo like this that contained all the elements in it and you know it it looks good as like a you know like as a tapestry or as uh you know the andrew gould looked at some of these and said oh it looks like uh like a forged gate you know something like that but not a logo uh yeah exactly that so they they become almost decorative and they would work as decorative pieces but there’s there’s too much information so again the challenge was to really condense down and and like i said i had like a tree to deal with i had dragons to deal with and the doves so there’s a lot of elements um so we went through a few rounds and i was like still it’s still too much and i think then you sort of said right we need to sort of go back to basics and get into the world of the logo and here are some kind of early attempts at that to really kind of um just condense down like what could a tree be what is the minimal we could show that could represent a tree and what it you know in this case it’s like you know there’s three strands and then i’ve made the dragon just ahead you know and we’ve kept the doves um yeah and then we had the idea of maybe if the doves if we show the doves landing on the actual dragon then that sense of protection and danger could be included into the into one image and at first even without the tree we’re like maybe we just have to ditch the tree because it’s too much yeah yeah i think we’re having those conversations are we going through like well how how much can we get away with saying and not saying i think um but at this point i think we use the dragon seemed to be the most important thing and the the best um emblem in terms of a kind of strong logo that was that was memorable so i think you i think this one was the one that was closest but at this point i’m i’m still using like off the shelf types of typefaces and i knew that i wasn’t going to get away with that because um you know the literally isn’t anything from uh norman cicely in terms of a typeface so no norman cicely typeface what are designers thinking it really doesn’t exist like nothing even close you need more of them so um so yeah i was i got to this stage i was like right do you know what i’m just gonna park the dragon for a bit look at the lettering and then i’m going to come back once i’m aware of what’s going to happen with that so in terms of lettering i looked at probably like 30 or something different mosaics from across you know Byzantine architecture looked at um san marco um looked at ravana places like that and really what you’re looking at when you when you when you look at this kind of thing you’re trying to find averages so you’re like you know you look at all the s’s and go what what’s the kind of tendency towards how they how they would express an s for example um the other thing to say is when you’re drawing a typeface you um you want it you want it to have some of the idiosyncrasies of that historic typeface but not too much because it it has to work in the modern world so for example you know so much some of these letters you would i would draw it accurately and then and then i would kind of iron it out so to speak to make it more kind of commercial and feel and you’re also looking for opportunities to kind of inject um other other kind of meanings and so with the o i was aware this shape here you know is is in the icon of the transfiguration and this this side window of christ it seems to be a very significant shape in christian art i’m sure you know much more about it than i do so that that kind of gave me um the idea of how i wanted to do the o’s um and this is the this was the first drawing in black of um the typeface and i once i’d done this i felt pretty happy that i had lettering that that was from that world um but like i said it’s always a balance between like the historic and then also the commercial or the you know the modern um so i then started looking to you know turn it into more of a brand and i just i don’t know how it happened just this idea one day i just thought what if one of the doves kind of was landing on the eye and then i had the idea of having a little like tree like ligature on the eye and i was looking at it was thinking you know this now has kind of the imagery of the arc which i think is kind of appropriate for what jonathan’s doing so that kind of fits it as well and yeah it’s the arc but it’s it’s also it’s it is the dove carrying the branch carrying the pattern it’s it’s powerful but then it’s also referencing back to the periodexian tree in a subtle way right it’s not it’s not as explicit but it’s it has it has the the bird landing on the tree as well yeah so i was hoping that it that it answered the periodexian tree brief but also it kind of had wider associations for people because i don’t think you know you can look at a dove without thinking of the flood narrative i mean it’s of course i’m sure most people yeah i wouldn’t even think of that when they saw it but it’s there yeah and and then i started looking at the rendering so obviously wanted to go back to the kind of the beautiful real gold mosaics that i’d looked at in the reference and and the other reason i went for it is because i knew that you probably want something a bit dimensional like we talked about in the beginning that you know you’ve done things that are that are quite cinematic and i know your channel is kind of famous for movie interpretation so i was like what what if i rendered it like you know a movie title i’ve worked a lot of films that have that like metal type you know very big at the moment so i thought yeah i thought it kind of worked again it was like historical but it also um had a bit of kind of pop culture about it as well yeah um and then to the dragon so this was my final drawing of the dragon um and then adding the little branch inside the the circle too because we kept struggling at how we’re going to include the tree and then you had this idea of just like if we just had this little branch and all of a sudden the tree comes in without it being too explicitly referenced yeah i actually saw it on a roman mosaic they had this little thing coming in and and i was like okay that’s how we do that so again it’s just gesturing isn’t it rather than having to explain the whole thing um so yeah this this is the final dragon and um i was aware that in terms this is my kind of concept for the website i was aware in the website you know we’ve got these two elements that i was really happy that the dragon is working on its own as a symbol that that you’d be able to use but in terms of the website we might want to have two elements together so again you’re thinking about hierarchy you’ve got the title and then the dragon becomes a watermark so you know as for you as my client i’m trying to give you as many different opportunities because you’ve got many many kind of applications you might be doing t-shirts you know and so you’re giving people a kind of set of assets that they can then adapt so i felt like you know that that was going to kind of serve those purposes um and yeah so this is the actual website which is now live and looking great i’m so pleased because it looks exactly like um like what you had thought of yeah it’s perfect i think that it does have that it does have a kind of cinematic feel to it and there’s also a certain sobriety and simplicity even though the the language like the letters are flickering and golden the basic aesthetics of the website is simple and the same with the like you’re showing the thumbnails for the videos too uh heather kind of gave us a direction for the thumbnails you know to to have simple images with with simple text and then have the dragon inside and i think that the right that right mixture of kind of simplicity with the the very animated logo is perfect for what we’re doing yeah so now everybody knows the mystery of the of the new symbolic world logo and so i mean i think what’s great about this is that is to see how you know in some ways like somebody would look at the logo now and have no idea that it’s based on a peridexian tree but it but in some ways it doesn’t matter because the imagery is there and the symbolism is there in the title and in the in the uh it’s its own thing right it doesn’t have to be explicitly that but it alludes and it it refers to to these types of images in a way that makes the meaning implicit in the image so it’s like that’s also kind of how symbolism works sometimes we think that you have to make references explicit even in a story or in a movie or or sometimes it’s good to do that but sometimes you don’t have to you can just have them as as being very implicit analogies they don’t have to be made to try to make yourself look smart by making them explicit you know yeah yeah i’m a big fan of things that are suggestive um you know and i think yeah it’s it’s ended up being really interesting i mean one thing i forgot to say about the dragon is um the way that i designed it i really wanted it to be like a real hybrid creature you know it’s like the the wing is feathered you know it’s not like a standard dragon wing but one of the challenges was i looked into um uh the norman cicely and you can’t really find any dragons in that world they’re they’re much more like griffins because that world was looking much more towards islamic art in the east and and those influences and we looked at like messapartanian dragon dragons and things like that so it was always going to be a hybrid dragon um and so yeah that i had the feathered wing and then you know the tail is almost like a sea serpent so there was it’s almost like kind of three creatures stuck together um which for some reason it’s perfect it’s more like because the the dragon and i think that’s one of the things we were butting up against is that the dragon in western thinking is so tired in some ways like in fan in fantasy it has become so tired that you know proposing more of a a kind of griffin dragon uh is still the same idea as the dragon it’s the same thing uh but it has a it has a freshness to it that that makes you makes you notice it differently than if it was if it looked if it if we’d use the medieval dragon then it would have been it would have been like dungeons and dragons it would have been all these images of game of thrones and all these types of things would have been rising up to people’s minds and that’s not what we wanted so yeah because i think uh modern day medieval films are showing dragons in a particular way that we’re all used to as you described like leathery wings maybe their scales but if you look at the um dragons in manuscripts they’re really weird you know some of them have only got two legs like this one and then so i wanted to go back to the really weird dragons you know the really like you say hybrid hybrid dragons um and and try and use that because if you don’t have a direct reference you really have to kind of pull from different sources um so yeah i hope it’s kind of uh unusual in that way yeah so so heather thank you so much and i want to make the if everybody most people probably know that are watching this but uh some of those who don’t know yet heather and i have been working on other projects uh we’re going to publish a version of snow white that she illustrated completely and that i wrote and that i am it’s the thing that i’m the most excited about that i’m doing right now it’s really amazing uh heather just finished up all the illustrations they’re they’re they’re beautiful and powerful and and have all this rich complexity in terms of suggesting and symbolism so i’m i’m looking forward to to introducing that to you we’re going to have another conversation in a few weeks that are going to be talking about snow white and the choices that we made both in terms of story and in terms of illustration so i’m i’m definitely looking forward to introducing all that and and yeah and and continuing to work with heather so heather thanks for your time and thanks for all your creative energy you’re very welcome thank you