Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/610353
matrix of digital motion graphics. Color-coded versions of digital graphic designs were developed by motion graphics Art Director Felicity Hickson to play back on over eighty custom-built Mission Control technicians' workstations arrayed on a huge curved and tiered platform below the screen wall. All the graphics were specifically story pointed to illustrate various stages of the ill-fated Mars mission and final rescue. Custom set dressing and prop graphics were designed and executed by Neil Floyd. The near-future look of the film's NASA Space Center facility exterior was created by digitally compositing visual effects plates shot of the Whale building with the actual Korda Studios main gate, which is a very new, modern, metal and glass structure and was dressed as the NASA security entrance with the actual studio stages in the middle distance and additional CG buildings looming in the far background. For the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) sets, I wanted a funkier, more casual style to contrast with the high-tech precision of NASA's headquarters. Just outside of Budapest, the grounds of the 1970s era Hungexpo site provided a variety of office blocks and warehouse spaces which were very similar to the actual look of the JPL campus in Pasadena, CA, where NASA currently designs and builds its unmanned Mars mission equipment, including the 1996 Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner probes featured in the script. The warehouse spaces were used to create both a NASA rover workshop and JPL storage rooms where duplicate examples of earlier satellite probes and rockets were stored. NASA would always double all its probes in case any technical problems arose during their mission, so they could test out their repairs for them on Earth.