Comic Book Movies: A UI Designer’s Perspective
I am a big comic book geek and that automatically makes me a comic book movie enthusiast. Recently there are many comic book inspired movies that left me disappointed and grew tired of the whole thing. This shouldn’t be because I have been reading comics for over 20 years and I am still reading them now. So here I am trying to make sense of all this and wonder if there are some things that the movie making process can take away from designing UI. My understanding for movie making process are limited and because of that my point of view may sound a little naive, but here we go anyway:
Have a solid Wireframe
I see wire-framing is equivalent to a script for a feature film. Making your wire-framing clear and easy to grasp will be the solid foundation for the next step of design. I am guessing the same goes with movies, have as many script changes as you can, solid script equals better movies… right?
User test it
User testing is a big part when designing UI. We do it fairly often to discover flaws in our design and to have a chance to make changes when necessary. There have been quite a few blockbusters recently that fell below my (and many others) expectations despite their multimillion price tag. I wonder how often do they test their movies, playing the whole thing from beginning to the end by ways of storyboards and animatics. Surely if you test them often enough these expensive flops could be avoided.
Know your IP
You need to care and understand the IP you are working on because there will be people out there that cares a lot about the source material. I think stories can and may need be altered from the original source but there are some things that you cannot change such as the characters. These characters are the ones that makes these properties attractive in the first place, Actor/ actresses should inhabit the character they are playing not the other way around.
Keep it simple
Video games in general becomes more and more complex through the years and movies are no different. The lure of universe building and interconnected stories forces many feature films to set up another, that adds uneccesary complexity that does not feel right. Sometimes I wish that I can include every information into one UI screen but oftentimes these needs to be sacrificed for clarity, I think films should too.
I have some more points but I should avoid them because I want to avoid this turning into a full on rant. It is not all that bad though because there’s a movie recently called Civil War and it’s pretty great. Go watch it.
