Syd Mead

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Syd Mead at the 2007 Jules Verne Adventure Film Special Awards ceremony

Syd Mead (born July 18, 1933 as Sydney Jay Mead in Saint Paul , Minnesota , † December 30, 2019 in Pasadena , California ) was an American designer for the industry and the film industry .

Life

His first job was Mead in 1952 when Alexander Film Corporation , where he in the production of animated films participated. In 1953, he joined the United States Army and served as a training sergeant in Okinawa for three years . In 1956 he applied to the Art Center in Los Angeles and successfully completed his design studies there in 1959. In the same year he got a position at Ford Motor Company's Advanced Styling Center in Dearborn , Michigan . In 1961 he moved to the Hansen Corporation in Detroit , Michigan and worked for US Steel Books and Celcon Books, among others.

After three more years at Intergraph in Detroit, Mead founded his own company, Syd Mead Inc., in Detroit in 1970. He was awarded a 12-year collaboration with Philips . His clients also included Sony , Chrysler, and Mechanix Illustrated . He designed the BART trains for the introduction of local public transport in the Bay Area in 1972 . In 1975 he moved his company to Capistrano Beach , California . In 1976 he published the book Sentinel with the fantasy artists Martyn and Roger Dean .

He had his first contact with Hollywood in 1978 when he collaborated with John Dykstra , Douglas Trumbull and Robert Abel (RA&A) on the design of the film Star Trek: The Film . He designed segments of the mysterious cloud structure that the Enterprise flew through, as well as the spaceship V'ger. In 1980 he had two major projects in the works which, not least because of his groundbreaking design work, were supposed to write film history. For Ridley Scott's science fiction film Blade Runner , he designed large parts of Los Angeles, the flyable police cars Spinner , Harrison Ford's apartment and the Voight-Kampff machine , with which the replicants hunted in the film can be recognized as such. The weekly newspaper Die Zeit wrote on the occasion of an exhibition at the O&O Depot in Berlin in 2019: "Unforgotten is his toxic, rain-lashed, neon-glowed Los Angeles of the future in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner . Mead created the big city juggernaut as a cold concrete cosmos in which people can find themselves lose like ants. "

For Steven Lisberger's Tron , the first film in which a large part of the plot consists of computer-generated images, Mead designed the light motorcycles Lightcycles , Sarks Transporter, the tanks , the recognizers and, together with Moebius, the complete background of the electronic world. The Tron logo on the movie poster is also his work.

After that Mead worked a lot for the advertising industry (including Pepsi ) until he returned to Hollywood in 1984. For the film adaptation of the novel 2010: The year in which we establish contact through Peter Hyams , he designed the spaceship Leonov including the interior design and the probes. A year later he designed the number 5 robot for John Badham's number 5 alive! .

Collaboration on several unfinished projects followed, until his last major project took shape in 1986. The space transporter Sulaco from James Cameron's Alien -Sequel Aliens - The Return cannot deny its relationship to Sark's transporter from Tron. Syd Mead's design was not determined by a playful, superfluous look, but rather simple functionality. In the case of the drop ship UD-4L Cheyenne , however, both his designs and those of his colleague Ron Cobb at Cameron failed , so the director took over the design himself. In 1989, after Blade Runner, the second collaboration with Ridley Scott began. The Isobar project , in which Sylvester Stallone was supposed to play the leading role, and such well-known people as HR Giger and later - as a replacement for Ridley Scott - Roland Emmerich were involved, failed because of script problems and the sale of Columbia Studios to Sony. His next film, Starfire (1990), flopped due to director problems .

This was followed by work for television and smaller design contributions for Timecop (1994) by Peter Hyams, Strange Days (1995) by Kathryn Bigelow and Mission to Mars (2000) by Brian De Palma . He also created the look for the computer game Maelstrom and the design for Wing Commander: Prophecy . Since then, Syd Mead has been increasingly active in the industry and has published several books and a 4-part DVD collection called The Techniques of Syd Mead about his work.

Filmography

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Syd Mead, Visionary 'Blade Runner' Artist and Futurist, Dies at 86 in variety.com, accessed December 31, 2019
  2. ↑ a b Syd Mead: The Beauty of Urban Nightmares. In: The time. December 9, 2019, accessed December 10, 2019 .
  3. ^ Lex Roman: Inventing the Future with Syd Mead. September 17, 2015, accessed January 3, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Mead, Syd
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mead, Sydney Jay
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American designer for industry and the film industry
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Paul , Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2019
Place of death Pasadena , California