Just saw it last night. Amazing....
'THE' Syd Mead....
This was to be a one hour lecture, and extended to almost 1 1/2 hours. The audience was captivated and magnetized.
For those that are into Syd Mead, he gave a few pointers and insights towards how he comes about creating his paintings.
* Stories.. He loves little story things going on in his art. He will have groups of people doing things, and incredibly, some of the things they are doing is outrageously funny.
* He has his own set of versions of Perspective drawing, where he has 6 (not 3) perspective points. He created his own systems which help to show 'more' of objects then required. For instance, some of his clients are huge architectural firms. Syds systems for perspective allow him to bend things so that you can see 'most' aspects of say an interior layout in a building rather thing just a couple of the aspects.
* He works in small sketches. Freaked me out that some of my favorite work of his is only 7" square. How can that be? The people in them are so precise! But it is that it is.. He could build watches if he can paint that small and detailed.
* One of his favorite writers is Gibson. I'll have to check that out.
* In his work, instead of going for 'realism', he goes for pure fantasy. I guess that is truly how he can detach his amazing works from this reality with such distance and originality. For instance, he was talking about some of his own work and critiquing it, and it was hilarious, but it was of things I would have never thought of. For instance, he designed this wild tall, liquid flowing looking house cabin thing in the future that is tall like a tree. He kept joking about how it couldnt be done, etc, etc, but that it was 'fantasy'.
Amazingly, 'his' version of fantasy looks quite real.
* A thing he really likes is 'flora' (plants, trees, etc). He explained that plants are amazing in their structures. They are based on geometrics and fractals, (its a whole other story based on creation/sciences of how things reproduce similar yet different, like snow flakes, etc). The Flora bring things to life and work well in his reflections of his world famous shiny metals and chrome.
He had one photo of a small small moon (round asteroid) that was being mined. The mining equipment was INGENIOUS! It was slowly carving up this sphere for valuable ore. Mind you, this was an asteroid, not a beautiful planet, so no worries there. (Imagine the iron and various rare metals we could find on those things). The fourth photo down is that picture. Note 2 versions of mining going on. One is a hub structure with 4 rotating pit digging machines. They literally 'machine' the craters into the moons surface and all ore is channeled into the central structure. The second set of mining equipment 'things' was a rover that cuts a crater, and made a perfect ring or trek or path around the moon. Almost made the moon look like some sort of machined part or something like George Lucas' Death Star.
He talked about Blade Runner and the original Spinner. The original was very short and rounded, extremely wide. He showed a 3D animation of the shape that they had created for it. Way radical....
He talked about his days at Ford, (precisely 26 months until he miraculously was lifted out, as he explained). He talked of his many clients, from Japan to New York, to all over the world. And man was that guy funny, lololol.. He had us laughing continuously.
Then after that, he signed autographs...
I thank the Lord I lived to see that day and hear that guy's lecture. Awesome...
EDIT: Oh.. He uses a 17" MacBookPro UniBody. :d
Bill