Blog: Designing Worlds With S Kubrick

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I went to a SYMPOSIUM last week, and this time it was part of WORK rather than for COMICS SCHOOL!

For LO! UAL was one of the organisers of Kubrick: Designing Worlds, a two-day event all about, well, Stanley Kubrick. I must admit I didn't know much about him, going in - I've watched "2001" OBVS, seen a bit of "A Clockwork Orange" DECADES ago (on a dodgy 19th generation VHS) and went to the pictures to watch "AI", but that's about it, I thus thought I ought to do a bit of revision beforehand, so watched "The Shining" over a couple of nights, which was a very ODD experience as it turns out I have already SEEN approx 30% of the film ALREADY in various clips and ALLUSIONS. I was also glad that I'd started my revision early because CRUMBS it is a LONG old film - at some point in the late 1980s I think someone somewhere must have realised you don't actually HAVE to show characters walking ALL THE WAY from one scene to another EVERY SINGLE TIME, because films like "The Shining" seem to do that A LOT.

I wondered if I should watch any other films, but this turned out to be UNNECESSARY as the day was mostly about "The Shining", "2001", "A Clockwork Orange" and "AI"! WINZ! There was in fact an ENTIRE SESSION all about "AI", during which everyone seemed to agree with ME i.e. that it was dead good and all those idiots at the time who went "Ooh it's so SCHMALTZY and SPIELBERG" were WRONG. This session featured the BEST BIT of the whole day too, when Chris Baker talked about how he'd done the Storyboards. It was DEAD INTERESTING and also really nice to hear someone talking with a proper Midlands accent - as ever with these things, there were quite a lot of Posh People talking during the rest of the day!

They KEYNOTE was good too - I was expecting an IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS of the film "The Shining" but what we got was a MASSIVELY trainspottery look at where each bit of the film was shot and how it all actually WORKED within the studio complex, featuring spectactularly ANNOTATED aerial shots of Borehamwood. I speak as someone who has PORED over intensely detailed articles which try to work out precisely where photographs of the Beatles had been shot, so I was entirely prepared for other people to be just as KRAZY about their own obsessions, and this guy very much was. It was FAB!

The whole day, in fact, was dead good, and it had the added bonus of featuring "The Head Of Invention", which features in MY NOVEL, sitting outside. It was only after spending a few hours there that I realised that, unlike in the aforesaid BOOK, The Design Museum is NOT next to the Thames. It turns out that, in the time since I first wrote it, The Design Museum has MOVED. I feel a RE-WRITE coming on!

posted 18/9/2019 by MJ Hibbett

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