Christopher Norton

What I Did

I led 15 different creative teams from 11 countries and as many languages over a 7 month period to produce 15 unique photo design projects for a single weekend event in Lubomierz, Poland. This page is only the first team project, but I rallied teams around ideas by creating moodboards and storyboards and coordinated with a variety of team members including talent, location scouts and specialists like wolfdog trainers and pyrotechnicians. I handled all the logistics of travel and timing including equipment, vehicle rental, and accommodations. I was also the photographer/designer/retoucher for each project.

Project Overview

Pixelmania is an international collaboration laboratory for filmmakers, photographers, and costume designers to tell visual stories from comic books, movies, video games, and other pop culture. The event runs annually in Lubomierz, Poland.

Artists compete for acceptance with only around a hundred photographers allowed into the event each year. Almost every shoot I had was from a different country. Being able to work around a language barrier and work with different viewpoints was also a necessary skill.

During the event, attendees can book pre-scouted locations like ancient castles, abandoned factories, waterfalls, and Japanese gardens. Experts like animal handlers and pyrotechnicians are also available. I was able to work with the wolf dogs team and the pyrotechnics crew but you could also book horses to ride and other fun things too.

Pre-production

As a photographer at this event, you are allowed to bring in an assistant to help carry gear, but you're the person responsible for making everything come together and delivering art. Producer, director, concept artist, camera operator, logistics- just everything. It's a lot of hats to make five shoots a day, three days in a row all come together in a foreign country.

People fly into Poland from as far as Australia so it’s very common to plan upwards of fifteen complicated photoshoots for the three-day event. Months of planning go into building costumes, designing concepts, and planning travel. It’s a very friendly collaborative space, but teams are there to get something made and at a high level. With everyone sinking their own money into the cost of production it’s hard to walk away from the experience without also gaining a lot of respect for the time and money that goes into even larger group projects. With five to six complex shoots happening every day.

IP Research / Moodboard

To match the look and feel of the existing game I pulled

UI Design

I wrote out the why for the design so I could focus on whether things were moving towards the intended purpose. My intent was to create a moment in time where the character was checking the status and configuring systems on their super-futuristic spacesuit and the faux user interface needed to support that. Things like checking weapon stock, battery usage, life support, damage assessment, threat detection, systems diagnostics, GPS, and general OS controls are all reasonable things a space adventurer needs to survive on a hostile planet by themselves.

Once I locked in the reasons for design solves I laid down rapid sketches for possible icons and interfaces. The aim was to make sure I had enough variety and also that groups of UI could almost be guessed by the user without me have to spend lots of time finishing every icon out before having to throw parts away.

Illustrator conversion

I started creating vector art for the final composite once I had simple sketches in place. Mapping out the systems using UX flows made it easier to prioritize UI components according to available tasks. Threat warnings needed to be always visible whereas as monster guidebook might get tucked away.

Font - Metroid Prime Hunters

There are several font sets used through the history of the game series but, “Metroid Prime Hunters,” retained more of a terminal feel when placed into the composition. It was a tough balancing act to find something that felt like it could live in a world within a world. The pixelated font helped the text stay in the panel even though you can’t read most of it. It’s enough for it to just feel like you could read it if you needed to.