Jens Bringsjord
Science fiction and science innovation have been intertwined throughout history through an infinite loop. It has inspired both creators and innovators alike to take science reality just a few steps into the future. To get a better understanding about this. We needed to bring in a creator who sits in the centre of these two worlds of both science fiction and science reality.

John LePore
We design all the fictional technologies, interfaces, and holograms that you see in blockbuster films, superhero movies, science fiction films. If you're watching a movie and there's a character that interacts with an advanced technology, there's a good chance that we may have been the people that conceptualized it, designed it, animated it, and incorporated it into the film as a visual effect.

Megan Luedke
That's genre for the former principal creative director of Perception, an Emmy nominated design lab located in the metropolitan area of New York City. Pioneering the visionary process of science fiction. Thinking to architect the future, they divide their time equally between the parallel worlds of science fiction, working with trailblazing filmmakers and science fact collaborating with the world's most innovative technology brands.

Megan Luedke
Before we get into what perception does today, let's take a quick look at where they started and how a broadcast media company found themselves on the intersection.

Megan Luedke
Perception was founded by Danny Gonzales and Jeremy Lasky in 2001, after they left RCA to begin their own adventure into the world of broadcast motion animation. With the latest cutting-edge software’s that allow creators to use a desktop computer to animate genre and perception around 26 as a freelance motion graphics artist. Together they created a variety of broadcast media motion graphics from NBA Finals Replay animations to charts and graphs on ABC News's election coverage.

Megan Luedke
Until they were given an opportunity to play a small part in what was to become one of the world's largest movie franchises.

John LePore
We had an awesome opportunity in, I believe it was 2009 to contribute to the film Iron Man to we had a connection who we had done some smaller work with, who basically pulled us in as like a, hey, we've got an emergency. Somebody else was making some stuff for a thing that needs to be projected on set. And we figured you guys have a ton of hustle.

John LePore
You move quickly. You designed efficiently and effectively. Could you help us out with this challenge? And we put some stuff together. It was for the main character. Tony Stark is giving a sort of like keynote presentation if you will. And so, we made just some simple graphics that appear behind him on this huge stage.

Jens Bringsjord
Therefore, what I'm saying, if I'm saying anything, is welcome back to the Stark Expo and now making a special guest appearance from the Great Beyond to tell you what it's all about. Please welcome my father, Howard. Everything is achievable through technology.

John LePore
We're working on this piece and we're pitching them different ideas and concepts. And while we were doing that, we could literally just barely hear in the back of the room somebody on the conference call on their end say, like, oh, that idea looks kind of like Tony's glass phone. And we all were like, what did you say? Glass phone?

John LePore
What's that all about? Don't worry about it. We need these three, these Stark Expo graphics. Turn those out for us. So, we made our Stark Expo graphics. And I think over the weekend, after we had delivered those, we went to Home Depot. We had a piece of glass cut with rounded edges to the approximate size of whatever generation of iPhone we were at that point in time.

John LePore
And we made a fun little proof of concept video where we designed a totally fictional phone interface that animated around, and we had someone interacting with it and doing all these gestures and performing all these functions and just trying to like over the course of like 40 seconds, show off like a whole bunch of different functions. And you could use it for surveillance, you could use it to bring up your memos.

John LePore
You could send a snarky text message to you to your buddy roadie and like all these different things. And then at the end, it became holographic, and a hologram stood up off the surface of the phone. And so, we sent that over to them and we were like, hey, you know, we heard just, you know, if you ever needed someone to help you out with graphics for you for this glass phone that may or may not be in the movie, let us know.

John LePore
We didn't hear anything from them for four months, so we started wondering, like, did we, like, offend them? Was that like a huge insult to them? But the reality of it was they were deep in the trenches doing the production of shooting the film. And when they turned the corner from live production to post-production, where often they start figuring out how all the visual effects will be implemented into the movie, we got a call from them and they said, well, would you guys like to design an anime, Tony's glass phone?

John LePore
And we're like, Hell yeah. And they were like, would you also have time to do a glass coffee table and glass windows in his apartment and a bunch of screens in the courtroom and all this? And like there was. And it quickly turned into us delivering for our first time ever working on a major feature film delivering.

John LePore
I think, 125 visual effects shots. And we had a blast with it. We took it way too seriously. We would get on the phone with Jon Favreau, the director of the film, and be like explaining to him, like deep nuances of the operating system. And he and he would just kind of be like, that's nice and all, but like, you know, just make sure that, like, we can the audience can tell what's going on and that it feels slick and that it matches Tony's personality and everything.

John LePore
And so that that was our first sort of rodeo in that space.

Jens Bringsjord
Let's imagine you're a designer on this epic team at Perception. You've been tasked with creating some sort of future technology for an upcoming Marvel film. And you need to brainstorm, think creatively, and conceptualize possible solutions to the character's problem. Where would you start? Insert science fiction thinking a methodology where you search for alternative futures and perceive the world through a lens of what is possible instead of what already exists.

Jens Bringsjord
It's a way of mining wildest imaginings of the future to analyse our present-day reality.

John LePore
We also we love working with Marvel because they take this stuff is as seriously as we do and they geek out on it as much as we do. And there's times where we've worked with other film studios or different teams who they come to us and they're just, they're sort of like, hey, we just need our movie takes place in the future, so we just need you guys to make a bunch of glowing blue shit that'll just float in the air and let the audience know that that this is the future.

John LePore
And when we start talking to them about like what we were thinking that the interactions could be set up like this and that in this world, you know, things are unusually organic across the entire interface because people have A.I. assisted interactions and you know, and whatever. And they and they'll just be like, you guys are overthinking it way too much.

John LePore
We told you; we just need glowing blue shirt and those and those projects. It tends to not really go that well. And you know, they're not our best collaborations. But the team at Marvel, they always have a big appetite for finding ways that we can make these elements richer, deeper, and elevate them from just being this sort of visual effect that appears on screen or lets you know that you know where characters are on the map or that the doors are locked or whatever it is, but actually become more of like a world building device.

John LePore
And, you know, particularly the work that we did for Black Panther in developing the tech of Wakanda, you know, for us was it was an awesome way to push that in film in a way where we hope in our in our wildest dreams that audiences, when they see that they're inspired and, you know, it just spurs their imaginations about how technology will work in the future.

John LePore
When we were working on Iron Man two and making Tony's glass phone, they on set, they handed Tony the prop. Robert Downey, Jr is amazing at improvising and he just, you know, he's just doing random gestures and we are we're months later; we're handed that footage and trying to decode those gestures and build and even shape and lay out an interface so that like maybe there should be a dial element that appears here.

John LePore
And then we could have a draw that pulls out some extra controls or whatnot to align with this. So that's, that's one way of doing it where we come in, in the end and we're reverse engineering it for something like Black Panther, they knew right from the onset that the technology was going to be a big piece of the story and that there was an opportunity to have unique technology.

John LePore
So, we started working on the technology concepts while the script was still being finished, before they had done any photography, before they had filmed any of the scenes. And we just started, you know, experimenting and prototyping and doing everything from making CG animations of characters, you know, holding stuff in their hand and interacting with it in different ways to we saw the technology in the film Black Panther.

John LePore
We quickly arrived at this concept that there would be vibranium sand.

Megan Luedke
And no, it's not simply made up. There are faculty at the University of Tokyo who are studying the phenomenon of vibranium sand.

John LePore
So, the technology in the film Black Panther, we quickly arrived at this concept that there would be vibranium sand that would levitate in the air, positioned, and held in the air or controlled in the air by ultrasonic sound waves, which, strangely enough, is a real plausible thing. University of Tokyo is making Styrofoam particles hover in space using ultrasonic transducer arrays that are used to generate mid-air haptics.

John LePore
It was very much informed from some of our past work on some real-world technologies where we were exploring this concept of mid-air haptics for use in a in a car so that you could sort of reach out and feel like imagine you're using an augmented reality headset or a VR headset and be able to feel controls that aren't there.

John LePore
And using this thing where you can fire ultrasonic sound waves to feel sensations on the bottom of your hand or whatnot, it's very primitive. It's not it's not it's rough right now. But once the Wakanda’s get a hold of it, they'll be able to levitate vibranium sand particles. So, so when we, when we were developing that, we even we, we built a sand table in our office just so that we could play around with and hold sand and just try and make sure that like any interactions or concepts that we were coming up with were staying true to the qualities of sand and what it was like to hold so that like,

John LePore
you know, when, when you're holding your, you know, a diagram of a truck in your hand, you know, rather than hitting a different control to say, like, open the truck and let me look inside, it would just be like, no, just brush the sand away and have this natural interaction. So, on Black Panther, we did a lot of work like that before the film was, was shot and that ended up generating a whole bunch of different tests and experiments and materials that were effectively becoming the blueprint for how the Wakanda technology would work.

John LePore
And so that was materials that the producers and the director, Ryan Coogler, brought on set with them and would share with the actors and be like, well, see, here's a mock-up of how this could work. And then and then they suddenly were like, oh, okay, we thought you were, you know, full of shit when you're saying that we're interacting with magical sand.

John LePore
But once they saw it, they understood how they could, you know, interact with these things, how they could work with them and whatnot. And so, for us, it was really gratifying to see, you know, then after they go through the production process, we started getting footage back where in some cases they're mimicking some of the same exact interactions that we had prototyped months before.

John LePore
And then we're like, okay, cool, this is, this is all going to come together nicely for the for the final product. And then for us, it also becomes something where on a film like Black Panther, there were so many of these different scenes and effects that sometimes are integrated with all sorts of other complex visual effects that are in the film.

John LePore
They're interacting with this this hub, this hovering sand, but maybe the entire background behind them is entirely CG, or maybe one of the characters is entirely CG. And so a lot of that work ended up getting distributed not just from us, but to several other major visual effects studios like, you know, Industrial Light and Magic or these other enormous companies who then are given some of these prototypes that we had generated, again, as this sort of like playbook or instruction manual to help define how these things will work in this in this world.

Megan Luedke
But the perception could come in at any point in time on a film project, even a few weeks before the movie hits theatres. Thanks to Marvel's iconic post-Credits scenes.

John LePore
We got an emergency call like within. It had to be weeks before Captain America Civil War came out to design the spider signal that Peter Parker projects as the sort of after the credit’s scene at the end of the film. And we designed that in like 48 hours, made a whole slew of different options, made a ton of different concepts, and kicked it over to them.

John LePore
And a few weeks later, like I remember we were working on it and like we were just coming up with concepts and like tickets were on sale for the movie and we, and we went and saw it in theatres, you know, weeks, weeks later in, in other instances, you know, Black Panther, we started it was about 18 months before the film was released, and we weren't working on it nonstop for 18 months, but we were working on it somewhat consistently through that entire time period.

John LePore
And there'd be times where it would be a smaller team and we'd only be doing a few things here and there. And then there'd be times where it'd be ramping up and we'd be working on multiple different scenes from the film at the same time, as well as the title sequence, as well as the opening sequence and all sorts of different things all happening at once.

Megan Luedke
So, the team at Perception has played some sort of role, large or small, in nearly every marvel project since the very first opportunity with Iron Man two. So next time you're waiting for the Marvel Post-Credits scene and watching the credits scroll past and theatre, take a closer look at the names of studios in the visual effects category, and you might just see a familiar name show up.

Megan Luedke
Since our interview with John at the end of 2021, I did just that while waiting for the post-Credits scene. After watching Spider-Man No Way Home with no expectation of seeing their name. And to my surprise, it was there seeing the name of someone you've met in the credits in the movie. Love is a cool experience but imagine what it must be like to see a place you work and your own name show.

John LePore
Up being as fortunate as we are. And in some cases, it's we're not as fortunate. So much of the work that we do is super top secret and may always be top secret and may never come out for public consumption, or at least our involvement in it may never be publicly known, particularly when we're talking on a lot of advanced real world technologies and so for that reason, we tried to the projects that are sort of public facing, we try to do as much as we can to celebrate that.

John LePore
And I try to encourage everyone on our team to not try to be too, too cool for it or to chill. We haven't been able to do this during the pandemic, which has been disappointing. But traditionally, we would always take our entire team to the theatre. The day that the movie comes out, usually go see the first show of the day.

John LePore
And often when it's these giant Marvel movies, it's a packed house and try whenever possible to, you know, I'll slip the theatre manager 20 bucks to like, pause the start of the movie and let me run up to the front of the theatre and make a brief announcement. And, you know, sometimes after those films, you know, there will be kids that will run up to everyone on our team and say, like, we want it, you know, what did you guys do on them?

John LePore
That was so cool. I love Spider-Man, you know, and that sort of stuff. And I try I try to ensure that everybody takes a moment to, like, you know, appreciate that stuff and soak that up because there's not many industries in the world where you can be in a room full of people who are applauding at the by-product of your 9 to 5 job.

John LePore
You know, and I think it's important to soak that up and reflect on it and appreciate it. And I don't think, you know, and we work very, very hard on this stuff. I don't think anybody I don't think any of this gets too much to anyone's head or anything like that. It takes an enormous amount of focus and discipline.

John LePore
And there's just a lot of hard brute force work that goes into working on these films and both for us and many other people who work on these films. There's the bar for productivity is the lowest bar is set at like over commitment. And the highest bar is set at like barely able to sustain, you know, a balanced life while contributing to these projects, especially when you're getting close to the to the deadlines and whatnot.

John LePore
So, it's a wonderful feeling to see it come out into the world and see audiences appreciating this stuff. And yeah, we, we, we try not to let any of that be, be lost on us.

Jens Bringsjord
One of the challenges that perception faces when coming up with ideas of future technologies is the audience's willingness to learn and understand how the future technology works. Many times, these films using extremely advanced technology requires some sort of plot explanation in the story to communicate to the audience a bigger meaning and how it works or was obtained. Here's how perception deals with the challenge of the audience understanding a future technology.

John LePore
So, the I'll start with understood by the audience first because that's a that's a tricky thing in and of itself, which is that when you're designing this fictional tech in ways, when you're designing real tech, it is your responsibility to always be obsessed with your end user. Who is it that's using it? What are their needs? What are the things that will make this product or tool, you know, work easily for them, improve their life in some way, save their time, not generate any aggravation or challenges.

John LePore
How do you make it delightful and engaging and all of that? So, when you're working in film, we have two end users. We have the character who's in the film, who's using the technology in. In many cases, we're working on films where we're trying to make that character seem like they are the most brilliant hacker in the world and only they could make sense out of this overwhelmingly complex and rich technological system.

John LePore
But then the other end user is the person who's sitting in the last row of the movie theatre, Wolf, and down a burrito while glancing up at the at the screen and trying to make sense of this. And so you often have to find this way of balancing how can it be rich and detailed and nuanced and complex and part of this world and still, you know, do things like make sure that the important information somehow has a cheat code or a, you know, simplified iconography or these things that help it read really effectively, really clearly, really concisely, spend a lot of time talking about your visual hierarchy on screen and how you make sure that every single person in the movie theatre, their eyes don't wander all around this interface that you're controlling that like this is the one piece there's a lot of shit going on screen right now, but if there's one takeaway that you have from this, make sure that it's this. And it's interesting because for us that that is powerful in real world technology, too, in terms of, you know, guiding a user's attention.

John LePore
And especially when we're looking at things like augmented reality and looking at spatial or three-dimensional interfaces and how we interact with them, finding ways to cut through all the noise and draw your attention to the most important or relevant thing and have all your users focus on a particular piece very, very important. It never ceases to be a challenge.

John LePore
It's always something that we're grappling with in both film and real-world tech. But is an important piece of it process. How do we how do we solve these problems? How do we come up with these wild ideas? There's no there's no formula for success here. And a lot of it at this point, we become a little bit spoiled by having this great sort of tracker, this loop that we're on, where because we're cycling between these two worlds of fiction and reality or science fiction and science fact, a lot of the time we are revisiting some past experiences that we've had in real world tech when we're working in film and vice versa. But the other the other thing that we always come back to, especially when we're working with, you know, younger artists on our team or less experienced artists on our team is to ensure that our whatever we're looking at for reference that we're not just, you know, hunting for inspiration or a reference from other films or from our other colleagues that are out in the space.

John LePore
I think it's important to keep an eye on what everybody's up to and follow that stuff, but always trying to find our key points of inspiration from completely different mediums or platforms or things that will inform how we are, how we're working with these ideas. Because otherwise you can get caught in this sort of loop of like, you know, you're your inspiration is the same inspiration as everybody else's, which is now becoming the inspiration for everybody else's same use of the same sources of inspiration.

John LePore
There is there is even a period in maybe the early 20 tens or so where there were a handful of platforms that were like the hot go to places to find your inspiration or whatnot. And you would just start seeing in, in all the work, these, these things popping back up and being like, oh yeah, I've seen the reference image that inspired that title sequence or inspired this thing.

John LePore
And, and it's and there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with that. I think that's great. But in terms of, you know, trying to and again, this this whole space, this idea of like futuristic tech in movies, it is pervasive at this point. And so, there's not many, many movies where you would not be at all surprised to be like, oh, did you see that movie?

John LePore
Had a glowing blue hologram appeared in it? Oh, which movie was it? There's a million of them where that happens nowadays. So, for us, it's always important just to make sure that you're looking outside of the traditional spaces where we typically find or the expected places to find inspiration when we're when we're working here.

John LePore
And that can be anything from, you know, spending more time looking at fine art or sculpture or architecture or interesting engineering. Oh man, we did a whole bunch of really fun stuff while coming up with concepts early in the process of working on the film Black Widow, we're looking at all sorts of like industrial actuators and just sort of like geeking out on crazy, you know, industrial things that are some of the most like dangerous tools for people to work with because they they're they contain so much pressure in these actuators that they actually misfire.

John LePore
They'll kick someone across the room and things like that. But just yeah, hunting, hunting for all that stuff is, is a is a big part of our process.

Megan Luedke
We've talked a lot about how perception works in the realm of science fiction. And as John mentioned earlier, there isn't many real-life tech projects they're allowed to share. But here are a few projects that have allowed them to apply their science fiction thinking to real life technologies.

John LePore
One of the very first calls was Microsoft. Among several other companies who had reached out to us and said, hey, would you guys be able to figure out a way to apply some of that magic to some of our real-world products and that that sent us on this trajectory. And, you know, there was there was a little bit of evolution as we shifted from a very traditional motion graphics studio where, you know, we were bouncing, oh, okay, we do a film, we do a tech project, we do some stuff for an ad agency, we do some stuff for a broadcast network.

John LePore
But for almost a decade now, we've been exclusively focused working either in film or, I should say, entertainment, because it extends now to, you know, streaming shows and even gaming, but working in entertainment and then working on real world products that people will pick up and hold in their hands. We also have several exciting things happening in the technology space from, you know, some major technology products that many, many, many people in the world interact with as they continue to update and evolve right in their hands to several exciting vehicles that will be coming out in the coming years, next year, the Hummer EV will come out a really wild over the top. I mean, like a vehicle that is like pure personality, you know, giant electric truck with futuristic undertones. And we designed the entire digital experience that appears in in the Hummer EV which I think is something that came together really, nicely. It's sometimes very hard being very innovative within any enormous organization, like any of these gigantic car companies, which are just the scale of these companies is unbelievably huge.

John LePore
And to get any sort of design innovation put in place requires so many people at so many layers and so many levels to agree that you're you know, what sometimes is as subjective as art is, is the right thing to use in this place. And we were proud that the team at General Motors were very welcoming and very ambitious in pushing the concepts as far forward as we could, and appropriately so for this really.

John LePore
I mean, it is an outrageous vehicle, whether you like giant monster trucks or not. It is. It is it’s something that I hope will start appearing in some of the films that we work in because it feels like it's a very cinematic sort of sort of vehicle. And then we've got several other interesting vehicles that we're currently working on, almost each of which are like the most exciting vehicles of their kind.

John LePore
The 2017 Ford GT back in 2013 2014, we were asked by Ford to collaborate with them on designing the instrumentation for the Ford GT. And if you're not familiar with the Ford GT, it is nothing like a, you know, a Ford Explorer or even a Ford Mustang. It is a $450,000 Lamborghini killer, I would say. It's designed to destroy Ferraris, like literally the movie Ford versus Ferrari.

John LePore
This is a this is a continuation of the spirit of that rivalry and was an opportunity for Ford to create a vehicle that for them was just designed to be a statement of like the best thing they could possibly create. I am a huge car geek. My father is a racing instructor and I love I.

John LePore
The reason that I got into design was because when I grew up, I thought like the coolest thing in the world would be to be a car designer and to design Lamborghinis and Ferraris and things of that nature. So, to have a chance to collaborate with Ford on a on a vehicle like that was, for me, an absolute dream come true.

John LePore
And, and something that is actually, you know, created a whole other niche is, as I mentioned before, for our business, which is figuring out how this way of thinking about the future of technology can translate into the way that vehicles will transform transport us around in the in the future and there's a ton of really exciting and dramatic things happening with, you know, in, in the automotive world in general between electrification and, you know, autonomy being on the horizon and all sorts of other things.

John LePore
So, it's a space that we're very excited to be able to make an impact in.

Jens Bringsjord
Many of us use laptops, mobile phones, tablets, you name it. And while much of this technology in our lives is here to stay in this current moment of time, we asked what John's thoughts were about the future of technology.

John LePore
Yeah, I think it's an interesting thing because I there's a degree to which many of us in the technology world can sometimes get easily distracted with just what seems like the coolest, neatest, most unique, new, clever idea or innovation. And in my personal life, I try as hard as I can to maintain or, you know, observe others, and try to see the lens of, you know, where does simplicity i.t save the day?

John LePore
Where does where is technology too complicated? Where is technology more of a barricade than it needs be? What are the things that are making some of this more effortless? And where are these places where maybe there isn't technology? You know that there's maybe still room for it to be. But also, where are these places where there's technology where I don't even, I just want the technology gone or I want its presence to be out of out the way completely to hopefully use it to make, you know, the, the more human aspects of life, something that we can appreciate and enjoy even more.

John LePore
And I think there's you know, there's a world where you can think of like, oh, yeah, you know, I wake up in the morning and my autonomous assistant, you know, is calling out the orders of the day and all these things to me. And everything's this automated, you know, holographic Wallace and Gromit, you know, Rube Goldberg machine that that takes care of everything for me.

John LePore
But I think I think the reality of it is that there's going to be a much more of a hybrid of, you know, technology working well to make sure that you don't even know it's there and supporting your life in ways to ensure that tech is just as invisible as possible. We always talk about this idea that, you know, we may also be on the verge at some point of a sort of shunning of technology, because we're going to have soon a generation maturing who were raised by parents who were holding the backsides of phones in front of their children for huge periods of time.

John LePore
And that, you know, there's a good chance that that may just be seen as something that is just so, so boring, so often uninteresting, unexciting, and that there's, you know, reasons to, you know, for us to keep pursuing ways for technology to, you know, connect us more with just the real world around us.

Megan Luedke
If there is one thing you take away from this episode, it should be this. The creative industry is brimming with science and engineering, coupled with creativity and design. Perception is one of these places as they dazzle the world by dividing the parallels of science fiction and science fact through collaboration with film industries, large tech brands and even the military, all industries require designers in their team, and more and more of the world's leading industries are starting to realize this.

Jens Bringsjord
To learn more about Perception Studio, visit their website experienceperception.com.

Megan Luedke
Since our interview with John, he announced that in May of 2022, after 16 years of working with the incredible team, a perception he is leaving. We're very excited to see what he does next as a creative leader that designs the future through strategy consulting, creative direction, and so much more. Whether you were a student or a CEO, don't be a stranger and reach out to him on LinkedIn, Twitter or check out his website.