Background Detail in Sci-Fi Movies

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Sometimes you have to marvel at the level of detail on set designers for some science fiction movies. (It's almost like if you give someone with OCD enough money, beautiful things might happen.)

 

Alien

 

For the set design team for the movie Alien (1979), Ron Cobb was a conceptual artist tasked with putting together designs for the ship the Nostromo - the space tug you see in the movie. Though I can post pictures from around the web of the ship sketches and models itself, I'd rather focus on the minor signage you can see in the background of the interior of the ship.

 

 

The above is a series of signs designed by the graphic artist Ron Cobb (although this sheet is a digitized version based on his hand drawn originals). (The original can be found here.) Ron Cobb was the man responsible for imagining and designing all the human technology in the first and second Alien films. HR Giger of course was famously responsible for the monster itself, and Ridley Scott apparently kept the two men apart so that their particular visions would not become compromised or tainted by the others ideas. It's just amazing to me about the level of detail seen here.  This fact wasn't lost on the set designer for the movie Moon.

 

Moon

 

Gavin Rothery was the conceptual designer and the head of graphic design (pre-visualization motion graphics) for the 2009 movie, Moon. He apparently took Ron Cobb's work to heart when designed stuff for the background.

 

 

I was going to post a link directly to Rothery's own site but as he points out - there were a few spelling errors on of his background images. (For example, I corrected the spelling of the word "vacuum" before posting this.)

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Of course there's a;so some nice detail seen in Prometheus (2013). I might not be a fan of the movie itself, I can't fault it for art and set decoration. In addition to the semiotic standard seen in Alien picture above, they've added a few other items as well.