Kent Seki

	Interview highlights:
	Being with Tony as a hero - 1:31 min ............................................. Working with Jon Favreau and comic influences - 2:37 min ............................................. Iron Man’s mask shouldn’t obscure the actor’s performance - 1:20 min ............................................. Consulting with futurist John Underkoffler from MIT - 1:49 min ............................................. Appropriate use of 3D - 5:07 min

Inside Iron Man:

On set with Kent Seki, Visualization and HUD Supervisor on the Blockbuster Movie

- Kent Seki, Visualization and HUD Supervisor, Iron Man

Written by Jean Feigenbaum and Lance Christmann, EffectiveUI

The minute the UIRC editors saw the trailer, we knew we had to do a story about the visual effects in Iron Man. We were fortunate to hook up with Kent Seki, visualization/HUD supervisor on Iron Man and the creative director at Pixel Liberation Front — hoping he might agree to an interview.

Indeed, Kent was delighted to hear from us and was interested in talking about the cross pollination between motion graphics in film and interface design outside the entertainment industry. Exciting!

What follows is an amazing conversation between Kent and Lance Christmann, the chief interface designer at EffectiveUI, about the collaborative process of creating computer graphics for blockbuster films. Kent graciously shares stories about being on the set as Robert Downey, Jr., and the rest of the cast interacts with visual effects.

In addition to the audio snippets (not to be missed), we’ve segmented the presentation into three parts:

Settle in and enjoy.

The visual effects world was foreign to me …

went from being an art major at Yale, to a print designer, and then to the Web. Visual effects work was totally foreign to me. But as a kid, I read Cinefex magazine about motion control and other crazy concepts. It seemed very difficult at the time, and I didn’t’ know anything about computer programming.

Then in ’93 Jurassic Park blew me away. That summer I met Colin Green, who rowed on the Yale crew team a year or two before I did. Colin had just finished working on Judge Dredd using Softimage for computer animation. We talked and became professionally connected. He asked me to join the New York Pixel Liberation office in ’97. I knew nothing about visual effects and learned it all on the job. At that time, you couldn’t go to school for animation like you can now.

The honest answer is I got really lucky. Colin was kind and generous enough to bring me along. To this day, I owe Colin the fact that I work in the entertainment industry. I think a lot of people have stories like that in their lives.

Early on, I was a production assistant on Starship Troopers. I got coffee and tried to understand how it all happened. Then we worked on Fight Club and Panic Room. By then, I had learned enough that I could actually contribute to projects. Since then, I’ve worked on Elf, Matrix Revolutions, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Flightplan, Zathura, and I was a Visual Effects Supervisor for Stay Alive. We also did some VFX work for Superman Returns.

Part 1: From Pitch to Production

Christmann: Iron Man created a huge buzz in our offices at EffectiveUI. It was really exciting to see the email threads going around. That’s what drove us to contact you, so it’s wonderful to speak with you.

Seki: Sure. I appreciate the interest. I rarely hear about that cross-pollination thing happening outside the entertainment industry. So you’re the people who are actually making the things that we’re supposedly making or rather “faking” in the movie. That’s very rewarding.

Christmann: Actually, we have a rich heritage in film at EffectiveUI. Both our founders came from Warner Brothers and I graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in Film, so we’re very interested in your work.

Seki: Good to hear.

Christmann: Just to start out, what exactly does Pixel Liberation Front do? And, what is your role at the company?

Seki: Pixel Liberation Front is a boutique visual effects company founded by Colin Green in 1995. We’re in Venice, California. Colin pioneered the process of pre-visualization — called previs —which is recreating the physical production environment in a 3D computer program and animating the principal actions of motion picture sequences before they’re shot.

In a nutshell, that was his main focus. At that time, previs was not very well known and not very well used in films. It was used in some films and we certainly weren’t the only ones doing it. But Colin really pushed it forward. We would go to meetings and people would wonder what previs was and why they needed it. Colin had a long uphill battle getting it accepted in the industry.

Through his work in previs, Pixel Liberation Front actually started doing more and more finished shots and finals as well. And so we became a full service company, but a small one. We’re about 15 people now, and that includes administration and the artists who work here.

My title at PLF is Creative Director, and I think that’s because I’ve been here the longest. I’ve been working here since 1997. When I was hired, I had been working as a graphic designer mainly in print media. Though PLF’s New York office, I began working as a freelancer at various post houses and design shops doing motion graphics and commercials. I moved out to Los Angeles in 2002.

Since I’ve been here the longest, I pretty much know the history and culture of the company. So in that respect, I am the creative director because I set the tone for many aspects of the company and I act as a spokesperson for it, usually. But there are several artists here who are fantastic lead artists who assume the same role on projects that I do and that we have a healthy exchange of ideas. It’s a pretty flat hierarchy at the company.