The Expanse UI Design

Q&A with Rhys Yorke
Motion graphics designer - The Expanse (Season 3 & 5)

Rhys was kind enough to give up his time to share some insights around the making of The Expanse UI suite.

Big thank you to Rhys and congratulations to the whole team for a great body of work over 5 seasons!

What was your role on The Expanse?
I worked as a motion graphics designer in the Art Department, as part of the motion graphics team. I was involved in designing and animating the user-interfaces for the show, and The Expanse has quite a large number of them!

Which season did you work on?
I started on season 3 of the Expanse, and I was brought back in to help with post-production on season 5, in-particular the Razorback. The nice thing is that a lot of the design elements I was able to establish on season 3 have been carried out through the seasons that followed.

Would you mind sharing some rough timings on the project (ie. concept, design, production) to help give an idea of how long things take to produce?
In television, especially if you are creating work to be used by the actors, you do not have a lot of time to break down the script and generate new designs. We had to work smart, so we established style guides that outlined the design language for the various ships and sets, and that allowed us to develop a concept, design and animate the screens, and get it approved and sent to playback so they could test it on set. Often turn-around would only be a day or two.

Who did you work with on the UI design?
There are several talented people on the motion graphics team on The Expanse. Since the show relies heavily on screens to display story elements, the team is larger than a typically scifi show. I had the pleasure of working with Sumeet Vats, Victor Mare, Chris Ouimet, Robert Nowacki, Walter H. May, Colin Graham, and Nick Melia. Our team also worked closely with Naren Shanker as well as the rest of the art department, Ty Franck would also get involved when he was available. Honestly, I have not known a showrunner to be as invested in the motion graphics as much as Naren was on the Expanse, and it made for a great experience.

How did you get involved with the project?
I was working at Ubisoft on FarCry 5, when the motion graphics team lead, Sumeet, reached out to me to see if I would be interested in helping. I was up for a change, and I was a fan of the show (Season 1 was airing at the time) – so I jumped at the opportunity. Initially, I was just helping for a couple of weeks, but they liked my work enough to invite me to join the team, and the guild (Director’s Guild of Canada).

Was the majority of the work done in post production or did the actors have interfaces on the screens in front of them?
The great thing about the Expanse was that the Production Designer, Toni Ianni, was keen on having real interfaces for the actors to interact with as much as possible. This meant that we had the opportunity to build functional interactive screens as well as screens that were triggered by on-set playback. While we tried to give the actors practical screens whenever possible, there were times when a screen couldn’t be completed in the allotted time – either because the story points were not yet worked out, or the animations and timing were just too complex, so a lot of work is also done in post.

Anything else you would like to add?
One of the things with the Expanse was that the Showrunner, Naren Shanker, was very keen on making things as real as possible. What this meant was that any screen should look like it could be functional, and a screen that may have started off as an ND (Non-Descript) background screen could end up as a hero screen. Though this was time consuming, and extra work – I think it was a good call and paid off for the show. We were fortunate enough to have a visit from a former NASA astronaut during season 3 – that discussed with us NASA’s design philosophy. This aligned with what we were working towards on the show, and coming from a military background myself, I tried to leverage as much as I could to adhere to general military design guidelines.

At the end of the day though, the design needs to support the storytelling first. The screens are far from being perfect, the team put a lot care and passion into them. I learned a great deal on The Expanse, and I was happy that I was able to bring a lot of my training, knowledge, and experience to the show.