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Alex McDowell | |
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 Alex McDowell at FMX 2012 | |
| Born | 11 April 1955 |
| Occupation(s) | production designer, creative director, professor of practice |
| Years active | 1975–present |
| Spouse | Kirsten Everberg |
| Children | 2 |
Alex McDowell (born 11 April 1955) is a British narrative designer and creative director working in narrative media.
Alex McDowell was born in Borneo, Malaysia, to British parents. His father, H Blair McDowell, was an engineer for Royal Dutch Shell, and his brother, Jonathan McDowell, is a London-based architect at Matter Films. He attended Quaker boarding schools from age 7 to 18.
McDowell studied fine art at the Central School of Art and Design in London where in 1975 he and Sebastian Conran staged the Sex Pistols first headline concert. He then designed and printed T-shirts for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's King's Road shop Sex. With musician Glen Matlock, he founded graphic studio Rocking Russian Design in 1978, which is where Neville Brody started his career. [1] McDowell designed album covers for punk rock groups and musicians, including Rich Kids, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, and Iggy Pop. [2]
In 1979, McDowell was commissioned to design Pop's Soldier album. Iggy asked him to make his first three music videos for Soldier, and so, a year before the launch of MTV, McDowell became a production designer. In 1981, he co-founded design studio Da Gama, alongside typographer and designer John Warwicker. [3] He began to work with director Tim Pope, designing a series of videos for The Cure, among many others. Pope and McDowell made a video with Depeche Mode at the Berlin Wall, with Queen in Munich, and Neil Young in California. In 1986, McDowell moved permanently to Los Angeles to work in the burgeoning music video and commercials industry in Hollywood.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, he designed the sets for over one hundred music videos, including artists like Madonna, [4] Michael Jackson, ZZ Top, Aerosmith, [5] and others. He moved from production company Limelight, where he designed and directed music videos, including "Paradise" (1988) for Nigerian singer Sade to the Propaganda Films, co-owned by director David Fincher. McDowell worked for a year with Fincher, designing sets for Madonna's videos "Express Yourself", "Oh Father", and "Vogue", amongst many others, and commercials for companies like Levi's, Converse, Nike, Pepsi, Revlon, Sony, Coca-Cola, and Chanel.[ citation needed ]
McDowell's first feature also features virtual reality, The Lawnmower Man . Back at Propaganda Films, his work was seen by director Alex Proyas, who asked him to design The Crow (1994), an independent fantasy action film starring Brandon Lee, which opened at the top of the box office and went on cult status.
Beginning with The Crow in 1994, McDowell began to production design features, working with directors like Terry Gilliam ( Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , 1998) and again with David Fincher for a controversial film, Fight Club (1999). In 1999, he was asked by Steven Spielberg to design Minority Report . This film, which involved two separate pre-production design phases, made McDowell develop a new design methodology that built a holistic world for the narrative, within which the script evolved, and created a fully digital art department. [6] The film was released later in 2002.
McDowell currently serves as a professor of cinema practice at the University of Southern California. [7] McDowell was named the William Cameron Menzies endowed chair in Production Design in 2014. [8]
He directs the USC World Building Media Lab (WbML). [9] In 2014, the research lab was awarded the Future Voice Award at the Interaction Awards. [10] The lab tried to develop a new visual language for molecular biology, expressed in the World in a Cell. It was a funded partnership with the USC Bridge Institute. [11] [12]
In October 2008, McDowell founded the World Building Institute. [13] From 2007 to 2016, the World Building Institute hosted the Science of Fiction Festival every eighteen months. Based on art-science projects, the event reached upwards of 300 participants each year. Since 2008, Juan Diaz Bohorquez has been the European Director of the World Building Institute. [14] [15] For the past 14 years, Juan Diaz Bohorquez has closely collaborated with Alex McDowell. [16] [17] The World Building Institute has hosted workshops at the Berlin Film Festival and at the Berlinale Talents. [18] [19] [20]
In 2002, he won a San Diego Film Critics Society award in the Best Production Design category for his work on Minority Report and, in 2004, an Art Directors Guild award for Excellence in Production Design for The Terminal . In 2006, McDowell was named Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA, a design society, and was appointed Visiting Artist at the MIT Media Lab. In April 2015, McDowell was awarded the BritWeek Business Innovation Award. [21] [22]
Minority Report is a 2002 American cyberpunk action film directed by Steven Spielberg, loosely based on Philip K. Dick's 1956 novella "The Minority Report". The film takes place in the Washington metropolitan area in 2054, in which a specialized police department—Precrime—apprehends criminals by use of foreknowledge provided by three psychics called "precogs". The cast stars Tom Cruise as Precrime chief John Anderton, Colin Farrell as Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer, Samantha Morton as precog Agatha Lively, and Max von Sydow as Precrime director Lamar Burgess. The film combines elements of tech noir, whodunit, thriller, and science fiction genres, as well as being a traditional chase film, since the main protagonist is accused of a crime he has not committed and becomes a fugitive. Spielberg characterized the story as "fifty percent character and fifty percent very complicated storytelling with layers and layers of murder mystery and plot".
Malcolm McDowell is an English actor. He first became known for portraying Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson's if.... (1968), a role he later reprised in O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982). His performance in if.... prompted Stanley Kubrick to cast him as Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971), the role for which McDowell became best known.
Alexander Proyas is an Australian filmmaker. He is best known for directing the films The Crow (1994), Dark City (1998), I, Robot (2004), and Knowing (2009).
The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) houses seven academic divisions: Film & Television Production; Cinema & Media Studies; John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts; John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television; Interactive Media & Games; Media Arts + Practice; Peter Stark Producing Program.
The University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts's Interactive Media & Games Division first accepted M.F.A. students in 2002. The division currently offers both undergraduate (B.F.A.) and graduate programs in interactive media and game design, as well as B.F.A. programs in game art and themed entertainment and an M.A. in media, games and health. The programs include courses in game design, game development, production, audio, animation, and user research as well as experimental work in gestural and immersive interfaces, transmedia design, and interactive cinema.
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing and violent themes to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.
Full Sail University is a private for-profit university in Winter Park, Florida. It was formerly a recording studio in Ohio named Full Sail Productions and Full Sail Center for the Recording Arts. The school moved to Florida in 1980, began offering bachelor's degrees in 2005, and began offering online degrees in 2007. The following year, the school was granted university status by the Florida Department of Education.
Dark City is a 1998 tech noir film directed by Alex Proyas, and starring Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O'Brien, and Ian Richardson. The screenplay was written by Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer. In the film, Sewell plays an amnesiac man who, finding himself suspected of murder, attempts to discover his true identity and clear his name while on the run from the police and a mysterious group known as the "Strangers".
Tom Gilroy is an American director, writer, actor, producer, playwright, poet, musician, and teacher. Gilroy has written, directed and produced five films, including the award-winning short Touch Base and the critically acclaimed feature Spring Forward. He has appeared in over 20 television shows and 30 films.
David Blass is an American production designer and art director.
Tracy Fullerton is an American game designer, educator and writer, best known for Walden, a game (2017). She is a Professor in the USC Interactive Media & Games Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Game Innovation Lab at USC.
Immersive design describes design work which ranges in levels of interaction and leads users to be fully absorbed in an experience. This form of design involves the use of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) that creates the illusion that the user is physically interacting with a realistic digital atmosphere.
The Berlin International Film Festival, usually called the Berlinale, is a major international film festival held annually in Berlin, Germany. Founded in 1951 and originally run in June, the festival has been held every February since 1978 and is one of Europe's "Big Three" film festivals alongside the Venice Film Festival held in Italy and the Cannes Film Festival held in France. Furthermore, it is one of the "Big Five", the most prestigious film festivals in the world. The festival regularly draws tens of thousands of visitors each year.
Created in 2013, Media Arts and Practice (MA+P) is the seventh degree-granting division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
François Audouy is a French-American production designer known for his work in feature films, limited series and music videos. He is a frequent collaborator with director James Mangold, having designed The Wolverine (2013) its sequel Logan (2016), Ford v Ferrari (2019), and the upcoming film A Complete Unknown.
Aaron Covington is an American screenwriter and sound designer from Northwest Indiana.
Christian Cantamessa is an Italian-American writer, director, and video game creator best known as lead designer and co-writer of Red Dead Redemption and the Manhunt series, level designer on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and writer of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
Petersen Vargas is a Filipino filmmaker. He is best known for directing the Cinema One Originals Best Picture winner 2 Cool 2 Be 4gotten (2016) and the web series Hello Stranger (2020).
Stuart Candy is an Australian futurist and designer. Candy is a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation, Museum of Tomorrow. He is the first Research Fellow of The Long Now Foundation. His work deals with futurism and designing experiential futures through immersive storytelling.
Joshua Ashish Dawson is a film director & designer based in Los Angeles, California.
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