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Crossroads for the Arts

Mar 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Eric Melin

Content creation in Kansas City.

           

“This place is a wonderful mecca,” says MK12 partner Shaun Hamontree. “The cost of living affords you [certain opportunities]. History of America would have never happened had we been on the coast.”

Though the images that MK12 produces are on the cutting edge of design work, the group uses the same off-the-shelf computers and software (such as Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator, as well as Autodesk Maya) that everyone else in the motion-graphics world uses. “Our software profile is pretty unexceptional,” Radatz says. “[We have] learned to tweak it over the years, but it's nothing proprietary or custom.”

Whether the company is creating an original piece, helping to tell a Hollywood story, or doing product-based work, MK12 is at its happiest when it can inject narrative into something and merge the world of graphic design with storytelling.

“It's easy to teach yourself how to do graphic design. What's not as easy is putting it in a context where it resonates and lives. Those are the challenges. We like to find out how to accomplish those two things and make them work together,” Radatz says.

MK12's recent film work for director Marc Forster has been a source of great creative inspiration, allowing the group to take its work to a new level and apply both narrative and functional concepts to design. In 2006's Stranger Than Fiction, MK12's onscreen graphics provide the audience with constant visualizations of an obsessive-compulsive IRS agent's mathematical mind.

The character, played by Will Ferrell, creates tightly organized lists and charts in his head, and MK12 was responsible for bringing those graphics to life onscreen. All the while, the challenge was to remain as true to the character as possible. When he goes through his daily routine, everything is as clean and organized as a chart could be. It's when Ferrell is met with something unexpected that the visualization changes.

“There's a point where he goes to the IRS office and somebody asks, ‘Quick, I need you to add these two numbers,’ and those are just hand-written on the screen,” Radatz says. “Because that's just stuff he hasn't organized as well as everything else, so he doesn't have a place to categorize it.”

The graphical user interface (GUI) for British Intelligence in Quantum of Solace was designed with the functionality of the user in mind. MK12 took into consideration that agents must be able to process information quickly and that each agent had a different set of needs. True to its slogan, the group did research and development into how the brain processes information, how the brain sees color, and how the placement of objects in relation to each other creates associations in the mind.

“M's office is a good example,” Radatz says. “If you look at all the stuff that happens in her office, it's very clean and you don't get a lot of extra data. Whereas when you're in the forensics lab and you have that big touchscreen table, there's stuff all over the place because they're a bunch of nerds that know how to operate at a programming level. M doesn't care about any of that. She just needs to know what the top-tier info is, so she gets the condensed version of what they have.”

This behind-the-scenes functionality also attracted the attention of Damian Gordon, a computer science professor at the Dublin Institute of Technology, who wrote about the pros and cons of the fictional interface of the movie. That same detail was carried over into the design for MI6's cell phones as well. Radatz says it is exciting to step out of the realm of what the group usually does to play “pretend” programmers.

“Until they call us on it,” Hamontree says.

See MK12's reel at reel-exchange.com/members/73b31d1a/profile.