Light designer Marc Brickman took Steven Spielberg to a Nine Inch Nails gig, in New York, to pitch his concept of using video graphics broadcast on powerful LED screens as a dynamic lighting effect. Steven liked the idea, and asked Marc to gather the same team that had worked on the Nine Inch Nails tour, for the filming of the ‘Flesh Fair’ chapter of his movie A.I. (Artificial Intelligence). The filming took place over the period of several weeks inside the huge Spruce Goose dome, in Long Beach, LA.
‘Flesh Fair’ is the turning point of the movie narrative. The hero figures played by Jude Law and Haley Joel Osmond are captured in a cage, beneath a rock concert stage with the industrial rock band Ministry performing live, whilst the various imprisoned robots are taken into the arena and creatively destroyed for the baying human audience.
The graphics were used as lighting effects when the cameras filmed both inside the cage and on top of the stage, and as a visible video backdrop for the panoramic shots.
We had produced an edit sequence for the full seven minute duration of the Ministry track ‘What About Us’, which was broken down into various graphic elements as looping animation clips. Steven then picked various clips like ‘blue sparks, red strobe, mechanical fire with boys face, and loads of strobes etc etc’ and we would then cue the required clip for the scene being filmed.
Available on DVD: A Steven Spielberg film ‘Artificial Intelligence’
Credits: Steven Spielberg’s Motion Picture A.I. (2000)
Company: Notting Hill Publishing
Light Designer, Concept and Stage Design: Marc Brickman
Lighting Engineer: Marty Wickman
Art Direction and Graphics: Gareth Evans
Video Editing: Suzi Karakashian
Additional Graphics and Raw Video Footage: Suzi Karakashian