Lately, I’ve been researching everything from science and space to architecture, fashion, mythology, music, and different eras of design.
A lot of my inspiration comes from places I never personally lived through. I’ll watch older animation or something with that classic Batman atmosphere and immediately get pulled into the mood: dark deco, Art Deco mixed with noir but still in color, jazz underneath it, the architecture, the shadows, the fashion.
There’s something about that visual language that feels beautiful to me, and I keep thinking about how I could reinterpret it somewhere inside my own world instead of copying it exactly.
I’ve been researching medieval periods, light fantasy, dark fantasy, futuristic design, older eras, current styles, and imagined futures. Basically, I’m interested in all of it.
The science side is just as important to me. I don’t want to build something and say, “Well, it’s fiction, so anything goes.” Even when something is fantastical, I still want to understand how it might work.
How would this technology function? What scientific principle could inspire it? What would living in this environment actually do to a person? How might a society develop around these resources? What would make this feel plausible enough that the audience could almost believe it exists somewhere?
Sometimes science sounds more fictional than fiction. Space definitely does. The more I learn about the universe we already live in, the more ideas I get about the ones I’m creating.
I’m also fascinated by how much you can learn about people through what they built, wore, listened to, believed, and considered beautiful. Architecture tells stories. Fashion tells stories. Music tells stories. Mythology tells stories.
So when I research an era, I’m not only looking for a pretty reference. I’m asking why it looked that way in the first place. Then I can decide what parts of that thinking belong somewhere completely different.
Recently, I was talking about all of this with another director, and they were surprised by how much research I had done without formally studying the subject in college. They told me the way I talked about it sounded like I had actually studied it for a degree.
That meant a lot to me, especially because I would love to go back to school someday and study this kind of work more intentionally. But it also reminded me that learning doesn’t only happen in a classroom.
Every article I read, every film I study, every scientific theory I fall down a rabbit hole researching, every piece of architecture I save, every era I start obsessing over — it all becomes part of the work.
The more I learn about what has existed, what exists now, and what might exist someday, the more possibilities I can imagine.