tomo FX worked remotely for Mr. X on the feature film TAU. Working closely with the director Federico D’Alessandro and Visual Effects Supervisor Raymond Gieringer through pre-production and in post, we created the blueprints for many of the film’s tech-noir holographic user interfaces.

A number of interfaces were developed around the movements and gestures of the actors during the shoot. We looked for ways to give these designs dimensionality and depth. We used techniques like echoing planes to give them a 3D holographic effect and giving them curvature so that they defined a sense of depth even when viewed at flat angles.

Working on set in tandem with the director, actors and the rest of production enabled us to extend the usual post-production oriented visual effects into live , real-time interactions. We created live interfaces using Unity and ran the application on touch pads, so that the actors could see and interact with these during filming. These applications were incorporated onto the sets and the displays responded to the actors in situ rather than having to be added in post.

Being on set gave us enormous potential to collaborate with the actors in the performances given against the backdrop of the myriad of visual effects in the film. An example of this was the 3D origami code seen below, which was projected from the antagonist’s touch screen pad throughout the film. The idea was to create interesting effects for the touch pads themselves, but then also provide something concrete and visually descriptive for the actors to have in mind for their performances. On set, this translated into giving the actors ideas for their interactions, and other times the actors’ performances could give us ideas to build the 3D effects around.

We wanted to try and create a representation of coding that wasn’t dictated by the usual cliché of arbitrary code symbols. We wanted to build something that used geometry in its representation and try and think forward to possibilities being presented by the onset of new real-world technologies such as augmented reality.

A major piece of design work for the film was to realise the director Federico D’Alessandro’s vision for the the main character of Tau. It was an iterative process over the course of pre-production.

 

With these, our brief was to create a digitised version of reality, one that would define the environment and allow the character to inhabit this space. From the the outset, with D’Alessandro’s vision and input, we strove to design with cohesion; such that the character of Tau, along with the digital interfaces and landscapes, all irrefutably felt like they belonged to the same world.