Stack Overflow: Making Movies – GeekDad

I’ve finally managed to dip into my stack of movie-related books (some of which are long overdue). A lot of times I want to wait until I’ve seen the movie because in many cases the “art of” books do include spoilers about the plot or reveal things that would be fun surprises when you first encounter them in the film. But that means if I miss the theatrical release, then I end up sitting on the book for a while. There are a couple in today’s list that I just ended up deciding I’d go ahead and flip through them even though I still haven’t seen the movies, so I’ll have to live with those consequences.

Elemental came out in 2023, but I didn’t actually get to see it until earlier this year. This story about elements—fire, water, earth, air—as characters coexisting in Element City is both a romance and a story of immigration. We see the fire characters making their way to the city from far away and moving into a run-down part of the city that eventually becomes a vibrant, lively Firetown. Ember, the main character, is expected to take over the family shop when her father retires, but it’s not really something she’s interested in. She meets Wade, a water character who was actually sent to inspect a burst pipe in the shop, and the results might end up shutting down the shop entirely.

The film is full of eye-popping visuals, particularly in the way that the various elemental characters are brought to life. How do you make a person out of fire? Or water? What happens when they interact with each other? Each of the different elementals has their own environments, too. This art book digs into all of that, showing character designs, details about the buildings, and more. One of my favorite sections was several pages of the package designs and signage used in the Fireplace shop, with snacks like “Wood Chips” and a “Lighterfinger” candy bar. This volume has my preferred ratio of text to art: it’s primarily images, but there are plenty of explanatory captions provided by various people involved in making the film, giving some insight into what you’re seeing.

Elio was this year’s Pixar film, and one that I haven’t seen yet. I didn’t feel like this one got a lot of attention—I remember seeing a trailer for it, but then I didn’t hear much word of mouth. Elio is a kid who’s being raised by his aunt Olga, who’s an Air Force major, and he doesn’t really fit in. He’s obsessed with aliens and UFOs and is hoping to get abducted by aliens because maybe then he’ll find people he belongs with. And as it turns out, he does get picked up and meets a whole lot of different aliens, including one who also feels like he has trouble living up to the expectations of those around him.

I really loved all the designs of the alien characters, environments, and tech, and this book has the same mix as The Art of Elemental in terms of images and text. There are storyboards and character designs, photos showing inspiration for textures and shapes. While it does include spoilers for some plot points, I also liked that it included some examples of a few plot threads that never made it into the film or were changed. This is a film I’ll keep on my “to watch” list for now.

The Marvel animated series What If…? explored the multiverse, asking questions like: What if Peggy Carter had taken the super serum instead of Steve Rogers? What if T’Challa had become Star Lord? You got to see animated versions of various characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, generally illustrated to look like the actors who played them, but in very different situations, all guided by the Watcher, who was able to observe the many different facets of the multiverse.

This book is a bounty of artwork from the show, including a lot of concept art. I really liked the art style of the cartoon, which has kind of a retro feel to it that reminds me of old airbrushed posters, and the book shares a little bit of the background on that. The organization of the book is a little strange: the chapters are broken up by episode, with the “what if” question as a subtitle, and the artwork in each chapter is all from the corresponding episode. However, the text from each chapter—and there is a lot of text—is a more broader look at the making of the whole series, organized in its own way that has nothing to do with the specific episodes. It’s kind of like two separate books that just happen to occupy the same space: a textual “making of” history, and a visual “art of” book. Still, if you liked the What If…? series, you’ll probably enjoy the behind-the-scenes look that this book provides. The book ends with a 2-page “teaser” of Volume Two, though the second volume does not appear to have materialized yet.

Speaking of the MCU, here’s a huge tome that attempts to put the whole thing in order—no small feat, with 37 films and a slew of TV shows as well. (The book includes the TV shows from Disney+ starting with WandaVision but doesn’t include earlier Netflix series like Luke Cage or Daredevil.) It is literally a timeline, starting from “the distant past” that include events that have been referred to in various films like the creation of the Infinity Stones or the prehistory of the Celestials, and progressing to 2025, which is apparently when the events of the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special take place. (Has somebody alerted Kevin Bacon?)

Along the way there are plenty of sidebars focusing on specific characters or highlighting key events, but I think the fun part of this book is getting to see how things overlap in time because it’s not always really easy to tell from the films. (Plus there are just so many that it can be tricky to keep track!) From time to time, Miss Minutes shows up to explain away potential discrepancies, giving an explanation of why those “errors” discovered by Marvel geeks aren’t actually errors at all. I do wish that each event was labeled with the film or TV series where it took place, but for the most part it’s just really impressive to see everything laid out like this.

The thing about a book like this is that it’s already out of date—it was published in 2023 and there have already been several more movies since then. Maybe they’ll update it after each “phase” of the MCU?

Now that James Gunn has made his imprint on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’s taking on the DC Cinematic Universe as well, and this year’s Superman was the official kickoff. There have been countless Superman films and TV series and, of course, comic books, so it was definitely a challenge to figure out what sort of a story to tell next and what to focus on. The result is a Superman that feels fresh but still shows its connections to its roots: instead of another origin story reboot, we get to fast-forward to a Superman who is starting to wrestle with various challenges. He’s been dating Lois Lane and she knows his identity, but now they’re finding that they have some differing views about what it means to be good. Lex Luthor has engineered his own superhuman who has managed to beat Superman in a fight. And there’s Krypto, an enthusiastic dog who doesn’t always behave … which is particularly problematic when said dog has superpowers.

This book is a sweeping overview of the movie, covering a host of different topics. There are character and costume designs for most of the characters, not just the main characters. It includes environments like the Fortress of Solitude, the Hall of Justice, and the Luthorcorp headquarters. Various people involved in the film share stories like how they made the crystals for the Fortress of Solitude or which comics inspired the versions of particular characters that we see in the film. The wide range of topics does mean that we don’t get really deep dives into most of them, but I did appreciate that the book does include a lot of direct quotes from the cast and crew.

The one really odd thing I found was that the majority of the images in the book are not labeled. The book includes screenshots from the movie compared to what appear to be 3D computer graphics used for the pre-vis (which looks like a goofy Sims version of the movie), but none of these are explained or captioned. There’s a story about making the perfect purple sweater for Lois Lane—but then no indication if the sweater in question is the one she’s wearing in the photo. I really enjoyed the film so it was fun to delve into the background, but for a book with so many images, it seems like a huge oversight not to explain what any of them are.

Now here’s a book with plenty of detailed captions for every image. There have been a lot of “art of” books of the Star Wars universe, showing Ralph McQuarrie’s amazing concept artwork or the costumes or the making of specific films in the series. This massive book, however, is focused on the actual blueprints, the detailed drawings of buildings and ships and droids that were actually used to build all the things we see on screen. As Rinzler explained in the introduction, many “art of” books show you the concept art and then the final images from the film, as if sets were designed built directly from the concept art. But there’s a crucial step in between: the draftperson who takes the idea and puts measurements and materials to it, who figures out where things have to be bolted together and how tall a doorway should be. This is a newly updated edition; Rinzler, the author of the original, passed away in 2021.

For the Star Wars films, many of the sets were designed, built, and then scrapped to make room for the next set, because there was a limited number of soundstages (but an increasing number of sets as the series went on). This book documents the incredible number of things designed for the entire nine-film saga, with lots of text that provides a deep dive into all the work that went into creating the physical world of Star Wars. One thing I particularly enjoy is seeing the occasional costume (whether droid or alien) that shows how the person fit inside. If you’re a Star Wars fan, this is a real treasure trove.

This is an older book (unfortunately now out of print) that got a bit lost in the shuffle, but I rediscovered it recently. It’s a list of all the injuries suffered by various characters from movies, along with their current prognosis. For instance, Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games is expected to make a full physical recovery (though perhaps not psychological), but Detective John McClane would probably have been paralyzed from the neck down after the first film. Each of the reports is accompanied by a cartoony—and often gory—illustration of the character with the various injuries labeled (including cutaways showing internal damage). If you feel like there’s not enough realism in action movies, this book reminds you just how few heroes could get up and walk away from their last fight.

Here’s a book for the small screen! The subtitle for this book is Illustrated Floor Plans and Scenes from the Best TV Shows of All Time. Lizarralde is an interior design illustrator, and he takes various buildings from TV shows and creates floor plans and exterior drawings based on the shows. In some cases, the actual floor plans seen in shows would be impossible, like the fact that Seinfeld’s kitchen would cut into the exterior hallway. Lizarralde takes some creative liberties to make floor plans that could exist, and also added things like bathrooms and closets in cases where they were never shown on screen. In many cases, TV shows use a house for exterior shots but then have sets built for the interiors, and Lizarralde shows what the exterior should look like based on what you see of the interior. The book covers a wide range of shows, from I Love Lucy and The Golden Girls to Friends and Breaking Bad. The illustrations are done in pen and colored pencil and are really lovely, and the book includes fun trivia details gathered from “watching hours and hours of TV.”

Further Reading

There are a couple other movie-related titles that are in my stacks but I haven’t gotten to them yet: The Art of Zootopia 2 by Kalikolehua Hurley is out now, but I’m waiting to crack the shrink wrap until after we get to see the film, because this is one we definitely want to watch. I’ve also got a graphic novel called Lucas Wars by Laurent Hopman and Renaud Roche, about George Lucas and the making of Star Wars. And there’s another big tome that I just haven’t gotten around to yet, Kevin Smith’s Secret Stash: The Definitive Visual History. And if you’re looking for a gift for a Star Wars fan and you’re ready to splurge, Doug Chiang: The Cinematic Legacy & The Star Wars Legacy is a two-volume coffee table book featuring artwork from an amazing artist and designer. (I got access to a digital version of the book, but I’m sure the hardcovers are stunning.) If I finally get through these, you’ll hear about them then!

My Current Stack

I recently read Strange Houses by Uketsu, a Japanese mystery novel that is centered around a few buildings with strange floor plans, which are diagrammed in the book. It’s one that I picked up at the bookstore because it looked intriguing. I also just finished Simultaneous by Eric Heisserer, which has a fascinating murder-mystery plot involving time travel … or something kind of like it. I’m currently reading both Process by Matthew Seiji Burns, a visually stunning novel about a tech startup, and The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, about a scholar researching his country’s foundational myth.

Disclosure: I received review copies of the books covered in today’s column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!

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