[Music plays]
Hi, My name is Harald Belker. I'm a concept designer for the movie industry
and my specialty is vehicles. I got hired to design the Batmobile, the Tron Lightcycle
and a bunch of other vehicles: Iron Man, Cat in the Hat, Minority Report, Total Recall.
I think in total about 30 movies that I participated in. I just finished my book PULSE.
I'm very excited. It describes my vision of the future racing. In my book, I used SketchUp
extensively for the storyboards that I did because I have a treatment in the book that
lets me set up every angle, every scene. PULSE is a fuel free racing. Basically you
have just four contact points to the ground they have to fit the driver and a big transformer
that would convert the energy from the track, so therefore everyone has the same playing field.
SketchUp is very fast. It actually allows
me to move quickly and fluidly in 3D, sometimes faster than I would in 2D.
I use this as an underlay and then the illustration ended up looking like that. You have the freedom to
pretty much do anything you want with it, so you breathe life into the model. Once you
build that world is 3D data and you can move around and set up your camera. It's pretty
much my virtual set. You know I become the director and the director of photography and
am really in control of what I want to see and what I want to show. It's very easy
to tell a story through it. If I had to draw it and set up the perspective and render each
one, it would have taken me two more years to even come close to a finished look.
With images we tell stories and SketchUp is just one of those programs that came along and
revolutionized the way we can communicate that. It just makes my life very easy,
almost a little bit a mind-blowing. I didn't want to be the guy who always said
"I have this idea," so in the end, I had to put it all together in a fully explaining
guide, with lots of images; just write it down and eventually share it with people.
It's very rewarding to have done it.
