Alex McDowell

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Alex McDowell
Alex McDowell at FMX 2012
Born	(1955-04-11) 11 April 1955 (age 69) Borneo, Malaysia
Occupation(s)	production designer, creative director, professor of practice
Years active	1975–present
Spouse	Kirsten Everberg
Children	2

Alex McDowell (born 11 April 1955) is a British narrative designer and creative director working in narrative media.

Alex McDowell was born in Borneo, Malaysia, to British parents. His father, H Blair McDowell, was an engineer for Royal Dutch Shell, and his brother, Jonathan McDowell, is a London-based architect at Matter Films. He attended Quaker boarding schools from age 7 to 18.

McDowell studied fine art at the Central School of Art and Design in London where in 1975 he and Sebastian Conran staged the Sex Pistols first headline concert. He then designed and printed T-shirts for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's King's Road shop Sex. With musician Glen Matlock, he founded graphic studio Rocking Russian Design in 1978, which is where Neville Brody started his career.^[1] McDowell designed album covers for punk rock groups and musicians, including Rich Kids, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, and Iggy Pop.^[2]

In 1979, McDowell was commissioned to design Pop's Soldier album. Iggy asked him to make his first three music videos for Soldier, and so, a year before the launch of MTV, McDowell became a production designer. In 1981, he co-founded design studio Da Gama, alongside typographer and designer John Warwicker.^[3] He began to work with director Tim Pope, designing a series of videos for The Cure, among many others. Pope and McDowell made a video with Depeche Mode at the Berlin Wall, with Queen in Munich, and Neil Young in California. In 1986, McDowell moved permanently to Los Angeles to work in the burgeoning music video and commercials industry in Hollywood.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, he designed the sets for over one hundred music videos, including artists like Madonna,^[4] Michael Jackson, ZZ Top, Aerosmith,^[5] and others. He moved from production company Limelight, where he designed and directed music videos, including "Paradise" (1988) for Nigerian singer Sade to the Propaganda Films, co-owned by director David Fincher. McDowell worked for a year with Fincher, designing sets for Madonna's videos "Express Yourself", "Oh Father", and "Vogue", amongst many others, and commercials for companies like Levi's, Converse, Nike, Pepsi, Revlon, Sony, Coca-Cola, and Chanel.^{[citation needed]}

McDowell's first feature also features virtual reality, The Lawnmower Man. Back at Propaganda Films, his work was seen by director Alex Proyas, who asked him to design The Crow (1994), an independent fantasy action film starring Brandon Lee, which opened at the top of the box office and went on cult status.

Beginning with The Crow in 1994, McDowell began to production design features, working with directors like Terry Gilliam (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1998) and again with David Fincher for a controversial film, Fight Club (1999). In 1999, he was asked by Steven Spielberg to design Minority Report. This film, which involved two separate pre-production design phases, made McDowell develop a new design methodology that built a holistic world for the narrative, within which the script evolved, and created a fully digital art department.^[6] The film was released later in 2002.

• The Lawnmower Man (1992)
• The Crow (1994)
• Crying Freeman (1995)
• Fear (1996)
• The Crow: City of Angels (1996)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
• Fight Club (1999)
• The Affair of the Necklace (2001)
• Minority Report (2002)
• The Cat in the Hat (2003)
• The Terminal (2004)
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
• Corpse Bride (2005)
• Breaking and Entering (2006)
• Bee Movie (2007)
• Watchmen (2009)
• Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) (visual consultant)
• Rise of the Guardians (2012) (visual consultant)
• Upside Down (2012)
• Man of Steel (2013)

• Bunraku (2010) (co-producer)

McDowell currently serves as a professor of cinema practice at the University of Southern California.^[7] McDowell was named the William Cameron Menzies endowed chair in Production Design in 2014.^[8]

He directs the USC World Building Media Lab (WbML).^[9] In 2014, the research lab was awarded the Future Voice Award at the Interaction Awards.^[10] The lab tried to develop a new visual language for molecular biology, expressed in the World in a Cell. It was a funded partnership with the USC Bridge Institute.^[11][12]

In October 2008, McDowell founded the World Building Institute.^[13] From 2007 to 2016, the World Building Institute hosted the Science of Fiction Festival every eighteen months. Based on art-science projects, the event reached upwards of 300 participants each year. Since 2008, Juan Diaz Bohorquez has been the European Director of the World Building Institute.^[14][15] For the past 14 years, Juan Diaz Bohorquez has closely collaborated with Alex McDowell.^[16][17] The World Building Institute has hosted workshops at the Berlin Film Festival and at the Berlinale Talents.^[18][19][20]

In 2002, he won a San Diego Film Critics Society award in the Best Production Design category for his work on Minority Report and, in 2004, an Art Directors Guild award for Excellence in Production Design for The Terminal. In 2006, McDowell was named Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA, a design society, and was appointed Visiting Artist at the MIT Media Lab. In April 2015, McDowell was awarded the BritWeek Business Innovation Award.^[21][22]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alex McDowell.

• Official website
• University of Southern California faculty page
• World Building Institute
• World Building Media Lab
• 5D GlobalStudio
• Alex McDowell at IMDb