Greeble — Visual Technobabble
While the concept may not have actualised for many, greeble has become a staple of industrial science-fiction design and is instantly recognisable once attention is drawn to it. The intricate surface detailings can be found on many of the most memorable spacecraft, props and sets across dozens of sci-fi franchises. The design element arose in the late 60’s and was popularised in the late 70’s as miniature effects prevailed as the standard for on-screen starships. The mechanical stucco adorned onto the spacecrafts was a deviation of what many audiences had come to expect from typical science fiction pop-culture, that of a sleek, mid-century modern design seen on the covers of pulp fiction magazines and novelettes during the 50’s & 60’s — the type characterised in Hanna & Barbera’s “The Jetsons” (1962).
The currently subversive properties of greeble were utilised by production designer Douglas Trumbull in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), to ground the designs of the shuttles and satellites in the film, lending verisimilitude to a film in a genre known for heightened truths and misrepresented facts. Being a meticulous realist, director Stanley Kubrick had Trumbull draw from the whitewashed machinery dotted with latches, hinges and truss beams of pioneering NASA spacecraft. Trumbull’s team achieved these details by developing a technique known as kitbashing, wherein pieces from Airfix model kits were repurposed onto the scratch built production models, transforming landing gear, spitfire fuselage, and even the injection moulded sprue frames into intricate interstellar machinery. The result was enormously impressive and is widely regarded as the initial development of greeble in science-fiction designs.
A year later, NASA would land on the moon, captivating 1/6th of the world in its live broadcasts, and the rest of the population via news broadcasts and newspaper covers. Images of Saturn V, the Apollo Lunar Module and the Apollo command & service module became ubiquitous, shifting the spacecraft paradigm from the smooth, soft-edged UFO or V2 Rocket, to the jerry-built reality that is aerospace engineering. Artists needed to contemporise the designs of outer-space machinery should they wish to pertain to realism in a world where the layperson’s knowledge of aerospace equipment had rapidly improved. The crafts on the covers of novels and illustrated in magazines needed to appear grounded, while still conveying futuristic qualities so that they would not be mistaken for existent spacecraft designs. Greeble, being an exaggerated form of the now recognisably astronautical machine aesthetic was the design motif to impart this idea and it began to appear in many science fiction illustrations which desired authenticity. For the majority of these illustrations, the details and actual structure of the greeblies is unimportant, the eye glosses over and it is understood as technology beyond familiarity. It was a thematically unobtrusive method of decorative diapering, enlivening what would be unbroken space with ornamental apparatus, visual coding for mechanics past comprehension.
Nine years after the production of “2001”, George Lucas would unabashedly mimic the appearance of Kubrick’s film during the production of, “Star Wars” (1977). Lucas would hire a significant portion of Kubrick’s production crew, forming ’Industrial Light and Magic’ (ILM), the visual effects company which would bring kitbashing and greeble into production design mainstream. The team refined the kitbashing process immensely throughout the film’s production. Small dome shaped greeblies could be given a gloss-coat finish and used to catch light, drawing the eye to certain elements. An emphasis on care was taken as to which pieces were selected, the Millenium Falcon was mostly comprised of greeblies from sprues for WW2 tanks, F1 engines and cargo truck suspensions to give the ship the characteristic of a ramshackled diesel freighter.
Kitbashing became an art of mechanical remixing, certain samples were prized by model making artists for their form and character and would be cast in silicone and reproduced in-house by the bucket. The massive quantities of greeble detailings adhered to the starfighters gave a sense of colossal scale to the miniatures. Every piece on the ships of the Imperial fleet alluded to a function — an engine bay, sensor array or faster-than-light travel systems — captivating the imaginations of audience-members. Greeble in this form was incredibly visually interesting, pieces being pre-built meant that artists could easily experiment with geometric form without the burden of designing the sub-elements, leading to massively intricate and visually engaging models.
ILM would win a litany of awards for its miniature effects and would define the ‘junkyard’ aesthetic for anything industrious in science fiction production design. Greeble became a design archetype in the realm of science fiction as a wave of other productions began employing ILM’s model making methodology. The authenticating properties of greeble were belied as it became intertextually entwined with pop-culture, correlating less with NASA engineering, and more with sci-fi blockbusters. The purpose for its inclusion shifted as a method of imbuing the characteristics of the greeblies into the holistic design. Sci-fi artists would begin to choose greeblies, either during kitbashing or when selecting reference imagery for illustrations with capabilities for visual coding.
This would develop to be the contemporary approach to greebling. It is malleable to the individual stylings of franchises and creates an avenue for models to be effectively coded into thematic relevance. This development is best observed in the evolution of Star Trek’s ‘Borg Cube’ design, from the initial studio model developed for ‘The Next Generation’ (1989) to the miniature created for the motion picture, ‘First Contact’ (1996). While the initial design was visually striking — a cubed horror vacui of piping and machinery — its design was misplaced as it failed to convey the nature of the cybernetic hive mind species which resided within. The design was revised for the feature film by production designer Herman Zimmerman, who commissioned a model featuring canyons of paralleled brass ribbons, junctioning large rectilinear components. The interconnected circuitry detailings of the revised cube portends to the assimilated, machine-minded inhabitants before any introduction or expository dialogue. This is greeble utilised to its fullest extent, complimenting the Borg premise effectively through visual encoding, in an aesthetically engaging form.
As a design element greeble can be incredibly effective when used with purpose and a careful consideration for the signifying properties. Its complexity can supplement details and balance designs, creating areas of high visual interest within the cavities and panelling of sci-fi vehicles and machinery. The deliberate care artists lovingly apply to models goes a long way to developing a design, whether that be to embody characteristics, imbue a thematic principle, or embellish designs with mechanical garnishings.
