http://www.thrillingwonderstories.co.uk/
*Quotes are unattributed and not, uhm, entirely verbatim.
"The great golden cities of the Middle East and Asia that were in architects' renderings are in suspended animation."
"This is not a fantasy, it's something we're actually building, but (apologetically) it's secret, like the ones in Moscow and Dubai."
"If you want to create an imaginative world, you had better have rules – the more freedom, the more rules."
"In making computer games, you can be like Gustav Klimt: do some painting, create a door, do the architecture and also some clothes."
"The location is a character in itself."
"A good storyteller ought to be able to give you one metaphor and get you there."
"We create a believable facsimile of the real world – and then we inject new things."
"We're taking historical incidents that actually occurred and building them into a fantastic narrative."
"The concrete wall begins to flicker and fluctuate to emphasize the unreality of the situation."
"These objects don't have to 'work.' We create things that look and behave plausibly in order to support the narrative we want to tell."
"Nixie tubes, microfiches, numbers stations… it's a game-world build from an authentic past that is knowingly retold in a contemporary venue."
"To flesh the world out, you need to have in your head what's going on around the corner."
"Dramatic situations mean less in the weak science fiction films that break their own rules."
"It's the ontology of low-resolution versus the alchemy of top-end computer-graphics."
"The poor imagery of cameraphones is more visceral and affective than the most sophisticated graphics. You know there's no artifice – you are seeing what you're seeing, and that's what there is: the death of Gaddafi."
"Computer graphics cut you off from the fan-boy construction-set mentality of fantastic films – and that's a huge part of the appeal, the sense that 'I could have built that alien myself.'"
"Within the fictional world itself there are people making documents, using images, telling stories."
"I've got a non-disclosure agreement – so please don't take any pictures of the screen." "Don't even remember it! Total darkness, black ops! Cone of silence!"
"We're a visual FX company, not to be mixed-up with a special FX company. Special FX is explosions, fires, a lot of jumping – I don't do those. I do environments."
"As a director, he's a big fan of 'the disappointment of reality.' So if you blow something up, it had better not be 'too good.'"
"Water, smoke and dust don't work well on miniature sets, so they have to be embellished on top of them."
"Shoot on location, even if you composite everything, and then you get the proper lighting and the sense that the actors are in an emotional moment."
"Robots feel more real when they're in a real desert."
"The thing that makes fantasy good is to not presume that you know better than reality. Make it dirty."
"This is the way to do the job: ask, 'how do we make the shot work?'"
"Whenever doing an animatronic head, start with the eyes."
"Here's another little frog that I can power up."
"You don't have to be a taxidermist to do taxidermy. I apologize for the smell. It's not the rabbit. It's the fox."
"The amazing thing about rabbits is that their skin literally rips away, like peeling an orange."
"Things go into the ground to go away – the ground smells like everything that ever died before."
"I'm like the abstract painter of the taxidermy world."
"Let Nature take its course… but in unnatural situations."
"The cytoplasm is a structured, viscous medium, a tensegrity structure, a beautiful, accessed space."
"Smart architecture to date has been either reductiveness, which insults, or turbulence, which threatens."
"An amoeba doesn't think or feel, but an amoeba has an agenda."
"Our society assumes a product isn't 'real' unless it can be marketed: otherwise, it's a special-effect. We need to expand beyond 'design fiction' as some attempt to boost the share-price with future earnings."
"The 'Flash Crash of 2.45.' Nobody can agree on what happened to the stock market then, because there is no human agency left to interrogate."
"When algorithms are producing culture, and algorithms regulate the sale and distribution of cultural products – okay, who is the 'user,' who is the 'audience'?"
"A 'story' is just information with an 'author.'"
"We're writing the unreadable."
"It's a superbright future, if you're an algorithm. We're terraforming the earth with these algorithmic efficiencies. They're a third evolutionary force."
"It's the last three or four percent that give you the suspension of disbelief."
