We had a fantastic opportunity to work with Territory Studio toward the screen graphics and UI for Matthew Vaughn’s (MARV) latest feature, Argylle. An aspect of this fast paced outrageously fun action comedy is a very serious secret control station containing a small army of tech wizards using high tech gadgets and spy software to do the bad guy’s dirty work. Our task was to create an archive of UI blocks and widgets to hit the film’s story beats and visualise the character interactions with these gadgets as they track, analyse and hack their way through the narrative.

UI design and animation plays a big role in the movie’s narrative with numerous scenes that feature digital tech being used to track down spies on the run, decipher blocks of code hidden in literature and various spy gadgets. The design process is driven by the story and once a visual language has been established a library of individual assets is created containing maps, architectural plans, radar scans, code breakers, CCTV analysis etc. These assets are then assembled into the densely populated UI screen graphics that you see in the film. Once the UI graphics are assembled, the animation is applied and brings them to life before they’re rendered and handed over to the VFX team who composite the graphics into the live action plates.

One of the biggest challenges in a film where the UI screen graphics play such a key role in the story telling is timing and continuity. Most of the screens in the film are operated by touch so the cast are constantly pressing the buttons on screens, making hand gestures to zoom or scroll through maps or lists etc. So the UI animation has to align and respond to this in order to maintain a level of realism. Some of the shot sequences in the film cut back to a single UI graphic around 50 times. To streamline the process for moments like this a workflow was established where a single graphic is animated alongside a live action sequence for the full duration. Synchronising the UI animation to the performances becomes fluid whilst a consistency of flow and pace is achieved throughout the sequence.