Designing James Bond’s interface

The “Art of the Title Sequence” blog recently did [a feature on the latest Bond movie, Quantum of Solace](http://www.artofthetitle.com/2011/01/24/quantum-of-solace). Besides the description of how the titles were designed (which is interesting in itself), the team also did work on the in-movie UIs and described their design process. Some highlights:

> We worked a lot of theory into the OS, reading up on new-age mind mapping and radial thinking techniques, which basically prioritize color, shape, and visual arrangement over hierarchical lists as a way to organize and process new information…

> Because the human brain responds to color faster than any other visual stimuli, we coded data sets with annoyingly-bright colors and arranged them into primitive ‘nodes’, designed to catch attention and direct the eye.

And for concept video geeks like myself, this was insightful:

> We mocked up the table at our studio and shot the full sequence using ourselves as stand-ins. This was very useful for blocking the action, as there were a dozen things happening on the table at once, and everyone was passing files back and forth. It would have been impossible to keep continuity without solid choreography. We set up a witness cam over the table and mapped out exactly where everything needed to be, using acetate sheets with tracking marks as virtual documents . We mocked up a previz of the scene with crude graphics on the table, took that with us over to London and supervised the shoot under Marc and FX guru Kevin Tod Haug.