Jayse Hansen, Screen Designer – The Avengers
The Avengers is ™ & © 2012 Marvel and Subs.
With the recent release of The Avengers on Blu-ray, now seems like a good time to revisit the amazing screen graphics & HUD design of Jayse Hansen.
In case you didn’t know, Jayse along with Cantina Creative were responsible for the amazing glass screen interface designs seen on the Helicarrier in The Avengers, plus the futuristic Iron Man HUD (Heads Up Display) and several other FUIs (Fake User Interfaces). Jayse’s previous work includes organic visualizations for Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the Ark screen user interfaces in the disaster movie 2012.
For The Avengers, Jayse began his designs surprisingly on paper, filling three notebooks, rather than just designing straight from the computer. He did extensive research for the designs, getting ideas from real life aircraft carrier and combat aviation screens.
He then moved into Adobe Illustrator to create the individual graphical elements and then from there into Adobe After Effects, where the individual elements were animated and composited. Cinema 4D was also an important tool in the process, with GreyscaleGorilla’s City Kit plugin helping to create the city navigation widget, which appears as part of Iron Man’s HUD.
To find out more about Jayse’s work on The Avengers in detail, check out the following links:-
- Full size screen grabs of his designs can be found here.
- Interview with Jayse discussing the technical aspects of The Avengers screen design at fxguide.
- Interview with Nick Campbell of GreyscaleGorilla explaining the role of Cinema 4D & City Kit in The Avengers.
- Interesting interview with Jayse at thecreatorsproject.com discussing not only The Avengers, but also his work on Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
How to create your own Iron Man style HUD to use in your own VFX projects
After checking out Jayse’s amazing work for The Avengers, you might be tempted to have a go at creating some HUD designs yourself.
Adobe After Effects & Illustrator are often the tools of choice for this kind of work, so if you’ve got both, you might want to check out these tutorials.
Iron Man Interface Battle Widget
This is a multi-part tutorial series by Stefan Surmabojov, looking at creating an Iron Man interface battle widget in Adobe After Effects. Stefan takes you through all the steps from creating the basic shapes in Adobe After Effects, assigning effects through to the final composition. Here’s what the finished widget looks like:-
You can find parts 1 & 2 of the Iron Man battle widget here.
Iron Man Interface Target & Radar Widget Tutorials
As well as the Iron Man battle widget tutorial, Stefan has also created two more tutorials:-
Iron Man Interface Target Widget Tutorial
Iron Man Interface Radar Widget Tutorial
Video Copilot Futuristic HUD Tutorial
In this tutorial, Andrew Kramer focuses on compositing a Iron Man style HUD with live footage of his sidekick Sam Loya. By using artificial lighting he is able to give the impression that the HUD is in front of Sam’s face. You can check it out by clicking the image below:-
HUD After Effects Project Templates
If creating your own Iron Man HUD interface seems a hassle and you just want the finished product to drop straight into your project or that of a client, Videohive may be the answer. They have a number of inexpensive HUD After Effects templates created by artists that are ready to render, you can find them here.