Farewell to Syd Mead, visionary designer of the fantastic worlds of Blade Runner, Aliens, Tron and Star Trek
2019-12-31T11:49:18.019Z
Farewell to Syd Mead, the "visual designer" who has imagined fantastic worlds for Hollywood, creating phantasmagorical architectures and futuristic vehicles for sci-fi cult blockbusters such as "Blade Runner", "Aliens" and "Tron". The American designer, with a prestigious background as a designer for the automotive industry and important international companies such as Sony, Honda and Philips Electronics, died yesterday at his home in Pasadena, California, at the age of 86. The family reported the disappearance to The Hollywood Reporter, stating that he had been suffering from lymphoma for three years. After his work marked by a vision of a gloomy and claustrophobic world attracted the attention of Hollywood studios, Mead collaborated with many directors populating his cinematographic "visions" of futuristic means of transport (cars, planes or spacecraft). Mead made his debut on set working for the 1979 film "Star Trek - The Motion Picture" by director Robert Wise, for which he created the alien entity "V'ger" and a series of probes. In 1982 he worked for "Blade Runner" by director Ridley Scott, where he obtained for the first time the definition of "visual futurist" (a name specially coined to describe his position): the police car "Spinner owes his creativity ", the squalid cityscapes of the main scenes and Decker's apartment. He was then the conceptual artist of Steven Lisberger's "Tron" (1982), "2010 - The Year of Contact" (1984), James Cameron's "Aliens - Final Clash" (1986). For the film "Timecop - Investigation from the future" (1994) by Peter Hyams he designed the police headquarters and the car driven by the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. Mead was later a 'visual artist' for other films, including "Mission to Mars" (2000), "Mission: Impossible III" (2006), "Elysium" (2013), "Tomorrowland" (2015) and " Blade Runner 2049 "(2017). Sydney Jay Mead was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on July 18, 1933 and grew up in South Dakota, where his father is a pastor of a Baptist church; since he was a boy, he revealed an extraordinary graphic ability and graduated in art studies at the Art Center School of Los Angeles in 1959. Already at the time of school he had started to collaborate with the Alexander Film Company, performing animation and backdrop designs. From 1959 to '61 he worked at Ford Motor's Studios in Dearborn, Michigan, then moved to the Hansen Company in Chicago and later collaborated as a designer with many companies such as Atlas Cement, US Steel and Allis Chalmers. In 1970 he founded Syd Mead Inc. in Detroit and in 1985 Oblagon Inc. Still in the 1980s Mead worked for the Japanese companies Sony and Honda and was a designer for several Japanese films. In recent years he has been awarded the Visual Effects Society Award (2015) and the Art Directors Guild's William Cameron Menzies Award.
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31 December 2019 Farewell to Syd Mead, the "visual designer" who has imagined fantastic worlds for Hollywood, creating phantasmagoric architectures and futuristic vehicles for sci-fi cult blockbusters such as "Blade Runner", "Aliens" and "Tron". The American designer, with a prestigious background as a designer for the automotive industry and important international companies such as Sony, Honda and Philips Electronics, died yesterday at his home in Pasadena, California, at the age of 86. The family reported the disappearance to The Hollywood Reporter, stating that he had been suffering from lymphoma for three years. After his work marked by a vision of a gloomy and claustrophobic world attracted the attention of Hollywood studios, Mead collaborated with many directors populating his cinematographic "visions" of futuristic means of transport (cars, planes or spacecraft). Mead made his debut on set working for the 1979 film "Star Trek - The Motion Picture" by director Robert Wise, for which he created the alien entity "V'ger" and a series of probes. In 1982 he worked for "Blade Runner" by director Ridley Scott, where he obtained for the first time the definition of "visual futurist" (a name specially coined to describe his position): the police car "Spinner owes his creativity ", the squalid cityscapes of the main scenes and Decker's apartment. He was then the conceptual artist of Steven Lisberger's "Tron" (1982), "2010 - The Year of Contact" (1984), James Cameron's "Aliens - Final Clash" (1986). For the film "Timecop - Investigation from the future" (1994) by Peter Hyams he designed the police headquarters and the car driven by the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. Mead was later a 'visual artist' for other films, including "Mission to Mars" (2000), "Mission: Impossible III" (2006), "Elysium" (2013), "Tomorrowland" (2015) and " Blade Runner 2049 "(2017). Sydney Jay Mead was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on July 18, 1933 and grew up in South Dakota, where his father is a pastor of a Baptist church; since he was a boy he revealed an extraordinary graphic ability and graduated in art studies at the Art Center School of Los Angeles in 1959. Already at the time of school he had started to collaborate with the Alexander Film Company, making animation designs and backdrops. From 1959 to '61 he worked at Ford Motor's Studios in Dearborn, Michigan, then moved to the Hansen Company in Chicago and later collaborated as a designer with many companies such as Atlas Cement, US Steel and Allis Chalmers. In 1970 he founded Syd Mead Inc. in Detroit and in 1985 Oblagon Inc. Still in the 1980s Mead worked for the Japanese companies Sony and Honda and was a designer for several Japanese films. In recent years he has been awarded the Visual Effects Society Award (2015) and the Art Directors Guild's William Cameron Menzies Award.
