FUI (Fantasy User Interface)

架空ユーザーインターフェース / 1997– / Style / UI Expression

The name that stuck to the craft of making the screens that appear inside films. It spread around the work of Mark Coleran, who says he is given credit for the term without being sure he can take it, and who describes these screens as illustration and a storytelling device that was never designed to be used. He works with light, shape, form, movement and sound so that each film screen has one thing the audience is meant to read.

FUI (Fantasy User Interface) — LCARS panel from Star Trek: Voyager, photographed 2016 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · © Niesy74 — LCARS panel from Star Trek: Voyager, photographed 2016 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · © Niesy74

FUI (Fantasy User Interface) — Enterprise-D bridge console from Star Trek: The Next Generation, photographed 2008 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 · © Kreg Steppe — Enterprise-D bridge console from Star Trek: The Next Generation, photographed 2008 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 · CC BY-SA 2.0 · © Kreg Steppe

At a glance

Visual cues

One thing per screen that the audience is meant to read, with everything else present as density
Columns of monospaced figures updating continuously while computing nothing
Thin luminous lines on black, with shapes drawn as outlines and almost no fill
Frames and controls that look like plausible equipment rather than pure abstraction

Best used for

Designing a screen that has to be read in the few seconds an actor is looking at it
Designing the display of a device that does not exist, as a picture that never has to work

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Dictionary entry

Type: Lead with monospace and let most of the text act as texture. Only the word that must be read changes size and brightness.
Composition: Decide the one thing to be read first and aim the light and the motion at it. Fill the rest with density that carries no meaning.
Material: One or two luminous colours on black, thin strokes, almost no fill. Pull the brightness down so the screen sits inside the photographed shot.
Caution: Trying to make the screen genuinely operable thins out the density and scatters the information, and it stops being readable in the length of the performance.
Further study: the screens Coleran worked on in Spy Game, Blade II, The Island and The Bourne Ultimatum / the idea of holding a single screen to one thing to be read / how brightness is pulled down and how the composite is handled when the screen is laid over live action

Related entries

Cyberpunk (サイバーパンク)Shared effects: Futurity / Exhilaration.Compare FUI (Fantasy User Interface) and Cyberpunk
Metalheart (メタルハート)Same UI Expression lineage.Compare FUI (Fantasy User Interface) and Metalheart

Often confused with

Diegetic UI (ダイエジェティックUI)compare

Cite this entry

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