Alex McDowell
From ADG Art Direction Wiki
Chairman, ADG Technology Committee
Bio
An advocate of immersive film design, McDowell integrates digital technology and traditional design technique, creating a production design process that allows for unprecedented control over the look of the final film. He started incorporating digital design into his work with Fight Club. He sophisticated the process in 1999 with a fully integrated digital design department for Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, creating an intensely researched world of 2054. For Spielberg’s The Terminal, he set up another cutting-edge art department to realize a full size airport terminal, the largest architectural set ever built for film.
Among McDowell’s other recent credits are two films with Tim Burton, the stop-motion animated feature The Corpse Bride; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl’s classic story; and Breaking and Entering, written and directed by Anthony Minghella. Mc- Dowell has recently completed production design on the digital animated comedy Bee Movie, written by and starring Jerry Seinfeld for DreamWorks Animation, and is currently working on the much-anticipated Watchmen, based on the legendary graphic novel by Alan Moore, and directed by Zack Snyder.
In 2006, McDowell was named Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA, the UK’s most prestigious design society, and was appointed Visiting Artist at MIT’s Media Lab.
McDowell is also involved in projects under the auspices of Matter Art & Science, a networked group of artists, designers, scientists and engineers he founded in 2000, that explores the integration of design and engineering and brings art and science into a new convergence. Key projects include a robotic opera Death and the Powers for composer Tod Machover with libretto by poet Robert Pinsky, in associating with MIT Media Lab; a fully immersive exhibit space in association with Long Beach University Art Museum. He is chair of the Art Directors Technology Committee, and is on the Advisory Board for the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach where he is the guest curator on a new series of exhibitions that fuse emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music, digital art research and art production. He is co-founder and organizer of the 5D: Immersive Design Conference that launches in Fall 2008 in association with the UAM and the Art Directors Guild.
A classically-trained painter, he attended Central School of Art in London, and then opened the graphics design firm, Rocking Russian Design in 1978, designing album covers and music videos including a clip for The Cure that featured the band inside a wardrobe, one of the smallest sets every built. Relocating to Los Angeles in 1986 to design commercials and music videos, he worked with cutting-edge directors, and by the early 90’s, he segued into film production design. Among his earlier credits are The Lawnmower Man, The Crow, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fight Club, The Affair of the Necklace and The Cat In The Hat. McDowell lives in Los Angeles, with his wife, painter Kirsten Everberg, and their two children.
