Miles is a short film created by Oliver Daly as a proof-of-concept to help fund the creation of a feature length version. The story focuses around Miles, a teenage dirt bike rider and co-stars M.A.X, a robotic canine-type animal, which references DARPA's BigDog.

Territory Studios (Jupiter Ascending, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron) was approached by Daly to help design M.A.X's machine vision, as well as some military control room screens.

M.A.X's HUD view is quite interesting in that it's set on a solid black background. It's as though M.A.X experiences night and day the same way. This arrangement allows the director to guide the audience's attention to particular points of interest very quickly, whilst at the same time portraying M.A.X as a very task focused machine.

The way M.A.X sees humans and objects is very fun. It's depicted as a fleeting impression of shapes created by layers of topography, depth mapping data with artefacts and all.

The rest of the UI elements are created with detailed line work and built upon neatly structured grids. I particularly love the topdown map shot with the minimal layer of typography over it (see first image in the gallery below).

There's a definite style to the military screens. It uses a limited colour palette and features precise details and tiny readouts that are balanced by the occasional large scale number or letter combination. Some of the details from those shots are brought to attention in the end credits, where they're presented with a shallow focus making them just gorgeous to look at.

Great work by the team at Territory!

Miles proof-of-concept film