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Doing Digital Design

Robert Stromberg in New Zealand in front of a rare physical set piece for “Avatar.”

Robert Stromberg was understandably emotional for a variety of reasons when he won an Academy Award for Art Direction, along with co-production designer Rick Carter and set designer Kim Sinclair, for their work on “Avatar.” He alluded in his acceptance speech to a serious illness several years ago that almost robbed him of the bright future he is now enjoying. Stromberg has chosen not to detail the illness, but surmounting it has permitted him to continue a decidedly unique career path all the way to Oscar glory. And that path started when he was just a youngster. He grew up learning how to do matte paintings from his father’s friend—a young Phil Tippett—while making little films in his garage. He later became a successful matte painter, working with industry notables like Albert Whitlock and Syd Dutton, among others. But eventually, his professional career moved him toward the world of digital effects for features, and he became a visual effects’ supervisor with his own company, called Digital Backlot. Then, in 2004, Stromberg earned an Academy Award nomination in the visual effects’ category (along with three others) as the visual effects’ designer on Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.” Still, Stromberg says he “never had production design in mind” all those years, while progressing through the visual effects’ world. And, yet, production design is exactly where he now finds himself.

Stromberg was co-production designer, along with Carter, on “Avatar”—a project that first earned them an Excellence in Production Design nomination from the Art Director’s Guild leading up to their Oscar nomination and victory. Following “Avatar,” Tim Burton hired Stromberg to serve as production designer on the visually tripped-out “Alice in Wonderland”—another high-profile, digital design project.

Shortly after his Oscar nomination, I chatted with Stromberg about his unusual transition from visual effects to production design, and how his background helped that transition for design work on state-of-the-art digital stereoscopic projects like “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland.” (“Avatar,” as we all know and as I’ve discussed in this column, was shot stereoscopically, while “Alice” was shot 2D with the Genesis camera recording to Codex hard drives, and then put through a conversion process to 3D in post at Sony Pictures Imageworks. The movie also utilized the Dalsa Evolution camera for numerous visual effects plates that required 4k image capture. I am now preparing an article for American Cinematographer magazine about the making of “Alice” and will post a link to that article when it is published.)

Stromberg fell into doing design work on “Avatar” when a friend called him several years ago to say that James Cameron needed some design help to prepare a studio presentation on the film, eight months before it was green-lit. Stromberg stayed up the night before his first meeting with Cameron, creating two digital paintings in Photoshop. These were the first images ever created of the fictional moon called Pandora, where the action takes place in the film. During their subsequent meeting, according to Stromberg, Cameron decided that was exactly the look he had been envisioning, and he hired Stromberg to continue his design work as the project wore on for several years.

“Cut to three and a half years later, and that one night of inspiration turned into a production design career for me,” he says. “I did about a year of design work with several other illustrators that I brought in. That was before the production was green-lit and I still considered myself a visual effects designer at the time. There was a (production designer) at the very beginning (Martin Lang), but once the movie was green-lit, he left the show and I realized the movie was so big we would have to split up the duties. So Rick Carter came on, and he’s gone on to be one of the guiding forces in my production design career. We split up the movie—I took on Pandora and all the organic elements of the planet, and he took on the man-made, live-action stuff, including all the mechanical elements and the physical sets in New Zealand. I found that splitting it up helped the story in the end, because we had two very different perspectives on the story—one gives you the design of the indigenous population on Pandora and where they live, and the other gives you the look of a foreign, alien force (humans who attempt to exploit the moon’s resources). That gave us a visual contrast similar to the story arc.”

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