David Sheldon-Hicks has spent 16 years designing the futures other people film. The founder of Territory Studio, the team behind screen graphics for Blade Runner 2049 and Dune, now has a microphone of his own. With Art Tindsley, founder of the creative technology agency Pogo, he has launched Reframe, a podcast about the place where creativity and technology meet.
The show starts from a simple conviction: “the medium is never neutral.” Every tool, from the cave wall to the algorithm, shapes the story told through it. Sheldon-Hicks and Tindsley refuse the old split between artistic intuition and technical logic, and they go looking for the makers, engineers and visionaries who work where the two overlap.
By his own account, Sheldon-Hicks was not sold at first. When Tindsley proposed the idea, he wondered what one more podcast could add to a crowded field. The answer is in the title. Asked constantly whether AI will take creative jobs, Tindsley has written that he prefers a different question: “what creative opportunity exists today that didn’t exist yesterday?”
The first episode sets the bar high. The 39-minute conversation with Patrice Vermette, the Oscar-winning production designer of Dune, Arrival and Sicario, covers his long partnership with Denis Villeneuve, why a set should work as a character rather than “empty calories,” and how limits tend to produce the best ideas. It is a conversation between people who have built worlds side by side. Territory designed screen graphics for Villeneuve’s Dune, and Sheldon-Hicks and Vermette have shared a stage at SXSW London.
Reframe is out now on Apple Podcasts, and listeners can send in a voicemail for a chance to be heard on a future episode. One episode in, the premise is clear, and so is the ambition. We will be listening.
Podcast: Reframe
Hosts: Art Tindsley, David Sheldon-Hicks
First guest: Patrice Vermette
Publisher: Reframe Media Ltd.