Minority Report changed production designer Alex McDowell’s career. The film didn’t begin with a script. Instead, director Steven Spielberg wanted a world that would jump-start the narrative. So with the help of a transmedia “think tank,” Alex created a detailed digital environment complete with its own society, politics, technology, terrain, and infrastructure. Alex spent the next decade world building, working on films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Watchmen. Now he runs 5D GlobalStudio and the World Building Media Lab at the University of Southern California, where students learn how to solve storytelling problems through design.
In this interview, Alex tells us about his current projects (including models for sustainable living and a virtual exploration of the world’s oceans), the future of media and narrative, and where he looks for inspiration.
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Instructor’s Welcome Note:
– Hi, I’m Alex McDowell, and I do a couple of things. I teach at USC. I teach a class called World Building at School of Cinematic Arts. I run a lab there called the World Building Media Lab that looks at the future of storytelling. And I run an institute called the World Building Institute that gathers large groups of people around the problems and the outcomes of the ways in which we’re going to tell stories in the future, with very much a design base.
And then I run a studio called 5D Global Studio, which is kind of a design studio for the 21st century, looking at all of media as our landscape and using storytelling as its base. I think, for me, world building started with a film called Minority Report. It was a disruptive space to begin with, because there was no script. And the fact of having no script, and having to develop a contextual framework for the story…
to develop a contextual framework within which the linear story would ultimately find a place, meant that we really had to build out the world. So, in simple terms with Minority Report, we realized that with very few initial triggers, very few kind of prompts from Steven Spielberg originally, so we knew we were in 2050, we knew it was Washington D.C., we knew it was apparently a benign future, and we knew we’d had a major disruption at the center, called the Precogs.
From those sort of relatively, a few prompts, we built out a really rich world, to the point where, not only did the story find its place, and specific sequences of narrative existed that could not possibly have existed if it had been scripted in the beginning, but also we realized that there were layers and layers more storytelling in that space that the film didn’t necessarily tap into, but that we knew that we could’ve gone back in and told 100 more stories in that space.
So, it was clear that there was something in this idea of building a world, building a large kind of horizontal context between all of the components of a world: the politics, the society, the terrain, the landscape, the weather, the transportation systems, infrastructure, education, all of these different parts became influential on each other, and the system of logic developed across the world, and then we would take that.
So, I think I very much talk about world building now as this very large, horizontal, if you like, slice through a world that gives context to the world, and then every specific problem you have within a certain kind of world allows you to dive in vertically, go deep into that problem, challenge the way in which you investigate the fine detail of the world, makes the entire world more robust. So, it’s becoming a kind of, it’s a process and it’s a system.
It’s highly volatile, it’s very adapative but it gives very accurate context for stories, and I think that’s the other big part of what’s changing about what we’re doing, is that narratives are multiple. Very few of the areas that we’re working in have a single linear narrative anymore. Film has, but in interactive media, or in virtual reality, mixed reality spaces, every single direction you look is kind of a different story, so we have to think very differently about the ways in which we allow, the ways in which we seed stories, and the ways in which those stories kind of emerge from the fertile clay of the world you build, and so this notion of world building as a foundational design practice is becoming, I think, almost essential for the future of storytelling.
Yeah, we’re doing a lot of interesting stuff at the moment. In the 5D Global space, in the commercial space, we’re working on a big project with the oceans, with Sylvia Earle, looking at really how to get people below the surface of the ocean, and how to be able to start telling really rich stories about the way in which the ocean is being impacted, and what the impact of the ocean is on the world. So, that project kind of has a similar interest to me as this project we’re doing in Saudi Ar
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