Category Archives: ~The Fritzes

Fritzes 2023 Winners

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The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition. Awards are given for Best Believable, Best Narrative, Audience Choices, and Best Interfaces (overall).

As we know, 2022 marked the third year of the COVID pandemic, but people just seemed to want to move on, venturing back into cinema en mass. Studios reportedly had tight protocols that still let them get big casts and crews onto sets and big movies made again. Surprisingly, the only category to not “fill up” with candidates features two animated films, which could have been made all remotely.

Best Believable

These movies’ interfaces adhere to solid HCI principles and believable interactions. They engage us in the story world by being convincing. The nominees for Best Believable were Belle and Apollo 10 1/2.

The winner of the Best Believable award for 2023 is Belle.

Belle

If Belle rubs you the wrong way for turning the volume on the Ugly Guy, Hot Wife trope up to 11, well, that’s because it’s a modern retelling of the OG, Beauty and the Beast. It adds layers of connections between a virtual world called U and the real world of Suzu and her “nerd in the chair” friend Hiro.

    The interfaces within U are not what this award is for. It’s the interface to U and all the primary-diegesis interfaces throughout. They’re well-designed and often improved versions of tech we know. Take special note of the lovely and subtle in-ear device that forms the “neural connection” that drops users into the virtual world.

    Please keep in mind 7 seconds is all IP law usually allows.

    Trigger warning before you check it out: verbal abuse and threats of physical violence towards young children. But it all turns out OK in the end, thanks to our plucky heroes. Catch the movie on Amazon Prime.

    Honorable Mention

    I want to take a special aside to note one surprisingly spectacular interface in a movie otherwise full of rather derivative ones. In the movie Warriors of Future [sic], most of the interfaces lazily mimic ones seen in other films, without adding anything of particular note. But then there is one scene in which Taylor and Huo Naiguang, two of the eponymous warriors, must escape a collapsing building while fleeing ferocious insectoid aliens. In their heads-up displays, they are given real-time, easy-to read augmented reality instructions on exactly what to do when to get them to safety. It’s fantastic and cinegenic and I just loved this moment. It wasn’t enough to save the film from the weight of the rest of its tropes, but I wanted to give the scene an honorable mention.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen augmented-reality assistant tech do this, and do this so well.

    Best Narrative

    These movies’ interfaces blow us away with wonderful visuals and the richness of their future vision. They engross us in the story world by being spectacular. The nominees for Best Narrative were The Adam Project, Big Bug, and Strawberry Mansion

    The winner of the Best Narrative award for 2023 is Strawberry Mansion.

    Strawberry Mansion

    In 2035, dreams are required to be recorded so that aspects within can be taxed. James Preble is a dream tax assessor who is sent to the home of artist Arabella Isadora to audit her older-model VHS dream recordings and determine what she owes. Entering her dreams, he comes to know and fall in love the dream version of herself, while in the outside world, psychopathic, capitalist forces threaten him even as he nearly loses himself in the dreamtime.

      The interfaces are lo-fi and really well done, shaping the dystopian and absurdist world where the lines between taxes and dreams and advertising are losing their meaning. Keep a special eye out for the wonderfully disgusting (especially for a vegetarian) Cap’n Kelly fast food ordering interface (is the sack-of-chicken character a mediated avatar or an AI?), and the lovely touches that connect Isadora’s helmet and her VCR.

      Watch it on Prime Video or Vudu.

      Audience Choices

      This year I present many Audience Choices awards. Across social media, the readership was invited to vote for their favorite, and the results tallied. The results are below.

      Best Low-Fi

      Between Strawberry Mansion, Brian & Charles, and the spectacular and narratively challenging anti-colonial Neptune Frost, low-fi sci-fi interfaces made their own special splash in 2022. This tactic lets filmmakers compete against the big-budget films with charm instead of money, and sets the work stylistically apart. I would not be surprised to see more of this in the years to come.

      Audiences selected Strawberry Mansion as their favorite, and just looking at this thing, it’s easy to see why.

      Best HUD

      There were lots of HUDs this year, with audiences choosing between seven: The Adam Project, Big Bug, Lightyear, M3gan, Strawberry Mansion, Wakanda Forever, and Warriors of Future. It was a three-way tie between M3gan, Wakanda Forever, and Warriors of Future, requiring me to cast a tie-breaking vote.

      So, congratulations to M3gan as the winner, notably for the lack of any obvious FUIgetry, even if I wasn’t sure why some framing rectangles were placed where they were, and the science of affective interfaces has proven dubious at best. It was still great stuff.

      Best Sand Table

      Sand tables are an important tool for telegraphing character’s plans to the audience and keeping commanders in the action with the grunts. Audiences had their pick between Black Adam, Lightyear, or Warriors of Future.

      Audiences picked Lightyear. Congrats!

      Best Reticle

      Reticles are often an opportunity for a little indulgent opulence wherever they appear. Some nice reticles were seen in Thor: Love and Thunder, Lightyear, and Warriors of Future.

      Thor: Love and Thunder walks away with the win for the reticles seen as the Guardians of the Galaxy—with Thor’s help of course—battle against the Booskan scum early in the film.

      Best Big Red Warning

      Big Red Warnings are important to show the audience that there’s an obstacle a character has just run into. Audiences had their pick of warnings from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Lightyear, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Warriors of Future.

      The winner is Lightyear, for any of the handful of red warnings throughout.

      Best Interfaces

      The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology. The nominees for Best Narrative are The Batman, Black Adam, and Lightyear.

      The winner of the Best Interfaces award for 2023 is Lightyear.

      Lightyear

      This movie tells the “real world” backstory of Buzz Lightyear, who audiences first met as the Quixotic, toyified version of the character in Toy Story. In the movie, Buzz makes a mistake that traps Star Command troops on a hostile planet. He tries to achieve faster-than-light travel that will help return everyone home, but returning from one particular mission he learns that Star Command has come under assault by a robot army under the leadership of the mysterious Zurg. With the help of a few plucky cadets and a robot cat named Sox, Buzz infiltrates Zurg’s ship, saves Star Command, and learns more about what makes a home.

        Pixar has long been a powerhouse for awesome interface design, and the studio is in fine form here. The interfaces feel just real enough for immersion, and just narrative enough to signal plot points and do all that troublesome exposition about how stuff works in this world. Also Sox is hilarious, and a fine model for zoomorphic general AI. Oh—and on the way they also remembered to give their HUDs an augmented reality to identify currently-cloaked teammates. Really, nice job, Lightyear.

        Catch Lightyear and appreciate its awesome interfaces on Disney Plus or amazon. And, hey, Pixar—I live right up the road. Have me over! 🙂

        Congratulations to all the candidates and the winners. Thank you for helping advance the art and craft of speculative interfaces in cinema.

        Is there something utterly fantastic that I missed? It’s possible. Let me know in the comments, I’d love to see what you’ve got.

        Fritz 2023 Nominees

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        It’s that time of year, when we look back at the sci-fi movies of the prior year to consider the challenges of on-screen interfaces and decide who did it best.

        I admit a bit of frustration with the sci-fi movies in 2022. Many just didn’t need interfaces to tell their stories. Just no name a few that come to mind: Everything Everywhere All at Once, Prey, Nope, Slash/Back, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, Next Exit. And many that did had interfaces that were just displays—and it’s hard to gauge the design if no character is using it. Of the rest, many looked very, very similar to stuff we’d seen before. Of course, that’s the way of cultural semiotics and the formalization of cinematic language, but for anyone looking at the body of work for progress—like, say, me—it can be frustrating.

        Despite this, there were enough movies to mostly fill out nominees. The exception was Best Believable, for which there are only two.

        See the trailers below, in alphabetical order for the category, and be sure and catch the shows so you can have opinions on them and cast an informed vote for the Audience Choice.

        Note: There are some movies that might have been nominated but were only released in cinemas in 2022, and as of the time of this post do not have a home streaming option. Looking at you, Avatar: Way of Water. Those movies could not be included, and, as this award just relies on stuff I’ve seen, I may have missed some worthy stuff. Sorry about that, but one nerd does not an academy make.

        Best Believable

        These movies’ interfaces adhere to solid HCI principles and believable interactions. They engage us in the story world by being convincing. The nominees for Best Believable are Apollo 10 1/2 and Belle (with a focus on the main diegesis, not the virtual world).

        Best Narrative

        These movies’ interfaces blow us away with wonderful visuals and the richness of their future vision. They engross us in the story world by being spectacular. The nominees for Best Narrative are The Adam Project, Big Bug, and Strawberry Mansion.

        Best Interfaces

        The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology. The nominees for Best Interfaces are The Batman, Black Adam, and Lightyear.

        Audience Choices

        This year I’m trying something new and offering up a whole slew of Audience Choice stuff: Best Lo-Fi interfaces, best Big Red Warning, best HUD, etc. This is partly a response to trope, but also an acknowledgement of trends.

        See and vote for the Audience Choices at this Google Form:

        https://forms.gle/NQSadzLHAfTHjGsAA

        Dates

        Winners will be announced near the end of March. I’ll lock Audience Choices on 12 March. I’ll probably share individual interfaces on Mastodon intermittently, which is where I moved the social media since the Muskification of Twitter. Happy, skeptical viewing.

        The Fritzes 2022 Winners

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        The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition. Awards are given for Best Believable, Best Narrative, Audience Choice, and Best Interfaces (overall.) This blog’s readership is also polled for Audience Favorite interfaces, and this year, favorite robot. Following are the results.

        Best Believable

        These movies’ interfaces adhere to solid HCI principles and believable interactions. They engage us in the story world by being convincing. The nominees for Best Believable are Swan Song, Stowaway, and Needle in a Timestack.

        The winner of the Best Believable award for 2022 is Swan Song.

        Swan Song

        Facing a terminal illness, Cameron Turner must make a terrible choice: have his wife and children suffer the grief of losing him, or sign up to be secretly swapped with a healthy clone of himself, and watch from afar as his replacement takes over his life with his unaware loved ones.

        The film is full of serene augmented reality and quiet technology. It’s an Apple TV production, and very clearly inspired by Apple’s sensibilities: Slim panes of paper-white slabs that house clean-lined productivity tools, fit-to-purpose assistant wearables, and charming AI characters. Like the iPad’s appearance in The Incredibles, Swan Song’s technologies feel like a well-designed smoke-and-mirrors prototype of an AR world maybe a few years from launch.

        Perhaps even more remarkably, the cloning technology that is central to the plot’s film has none of the giant helmets-with-wires that seem to be the go-to trope for such things. That’s handled almost entirely as a service with jacketed frontstage actors and tiny brain-reading dots that go on Cameron’s temples. A minimalist touch in a minimalist world that hides the horrible choices that technology asks of its citizens.

        Audience Choice, too!

        All of the movies nominated for other awards were presented for an Audience Choice award. Across social media, the readership was invited to vote for their favorite, and the results tallied. The winner of the Audience Choice award for 2022 is Swan Song. Congratulations for being the first film to win two Fritzes in the same year! To celebrate, here’s another screen cap from the film, showing the AR game Cameron plays with his son. Notably the team made the choice to avoid the obvious hot-signaling that almost always accompanies volumetric projections in screen sci-fi.

        Best Narrative

        These movies’ interfaces blow us away with wonderful visuals and the richness of their future vision. They engross us in the story world by being spectacular. The nominees for Best Narrative are The Mitchells vs The Machines, Reminiscence, and The Matrix: Resurrections.

        The winner of the Best Narrative award for 2022 is The Mitchells vs The Machines.

        The Mitchells vs The Machines

        Katie Mitchell is getting ready to go to college for filmmaking when the world is turned upside down by a robot uprising, which is controlled by an artificial intelligence that has just been made obsolete. Katie and her odd family have to keep themselves safe from capture by the robots and ultimately save all of humanity—all while learning to love each other.

        The charming thing about the triangle-heavy and candy-colored interfaces in the film are that they are almost wholly there for the robots doing their humanity-destroying job. Diegetically, they’re not meant for humans, but extradiegetically, they’re there to help tell the audience what’s happening. That’s a delicate balance to manage, and to do it while managing hilarity, lambasting Silicon Valley’s cults of personality, and providing spectacle; is what earns this film its Fritz.

        Best Robot: Bubs!

        There was a preponderance of interesting robots in sci-fi last year. So 2022 has a new category of Audience Choice, and that’s for Best Robot. The readership was invited to vote for their favorite from…

        • The unnamed bartender from Cosmic Sin
        • Jeff from Finch
        • Eric and Deborahbot 5000 from The Mitchells vs. The Machines
        • Bubs from Space Sweepers
        • Steve from the unsettling Settlers

        The audience vote is clear: The wisecracking Bubs from Space Sweepers wins! Bubs’ emotions might have been hard to read with the hard plastic shell of a face. But pink blush lights and a display—near where the mouth would be—reinforce the tone of speech with characters like “??” and “!!” and even cartoon mouth expressions. Additionally, near the end of the movie Bubs has enough money to get a body upgrade, and selects a female-presenting humanoid body and voice, making a delightful addition to the Gendered AI finding than when AI selects a gender, it picks female. Congrats, Bubs!

        Best Interfaces (best overall)

        The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology. The nominees for Best Narrative are Oxygen, Space Sweepers, and Voyagers.

        The winner of the Best Interfaces award for 2022 is Oxygen.

        Oxygen

        A woman awakes in an airtight cryogenic chamber with no knowledge of who or where she is. In this claustrophobic space, she must work with MILO, an artificial intelligence, to manage the crisis of her dwindling oxygen supply and figure out what’s going on before it’s too late.

        Nearly all of the film happens in this coffin-like space between the actress and MILO. The interface shows modes for media searches, schematic searches, general searches, media playback, communication, and health monitoring as the woman tries to work the problem and save her own life. It shows a main screen directly above her, a ring of smaller interfaces placed in a corona around her head, and it also has volumetric display capabilities. The interfaces are lovely with tightly controlled palettes, an old sci-fi standby typeface Eurostyle (or is it some derivative?), and excellent signals for managing attention and conveying urgency.

        The interface is critical to the narration, its tension, and the ultimate dark reveal and resolution of the story—a remarkable feat for a sci-fi interface.

        I would love to extend my direct congratulations to all the studios who produced this work, but Hollywood is complicated and makes it difficult to identify exactly whom to credit for what. So let me extend my congratulations generally to the nominees and winners for an extraordinary body of work. If you are one of these studios, or can introduce me, please let me know; I’d love to do some interviews for the blog. Here’s looking to the next year of sci-fi cinema.

        2022 Audience Choice Ballot

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        Next week I’ll be announcing the winners of the 2021 Fritzes. In the meantime, I’m going to make good on my promise to inquire after your choice of winners: Films and robots. Don’t let the Oscars prime you, in the psychological sense. Below is a recap of the candidates as a reminder. To cast your vote, click the link below. To guard against ballot-stuffing, this requires you are logged in with a Google mail account.

        2022 Fritzes Audience Choice Ballot

        Note that in years past I made supercuts of the interfaces from the film, but YouTube kept taking them down despite clear Fair Use. I could fight it, but it’s not worth the time and effort. So, please see the films and may these trailers act as reminders for the nine candidate films.

        Audience choice: Robot

        It could be my bias from working on and teaching about AI, but I noticed a preponderance of interesting robots last year. So for this year there’s a new category of Audience Choice, and that’s for Robot! Look for an upcoming post with a link to vote on your favorite. The candidates are the unnamed bartender from Cosmic Sin (who gets maybe seconds of screen time, but is interesting nonetheless), Jeff from Finch, Eric and Deborahbot 5000 from The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Bubs from Space Sweepers, and Steve from the unsettling Settlers.

        Cast your vote now at the link below.

        2022 Fritzes Audience Choice Ballot

        Winners will be announced near the beginning of April. And while I don’t have any idea how I’d find a single address to send physical awards to, I’d like to try for that this year.

        As always, please remember that the award looks at the interfaces in the movies rather than the movies overall.

        Fritzes 2022 nominees

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        Well, that was a solstice. As noted, I took time off from the blog to make progress on some other things. Those things aren’t done yet (I’m making fine progress on them, thank you for asking), but it’s time for the Fritzes! Following are the candidates for the 2022 Fritz awards, recognizing excellence in sci-fi interfaces across the prior year.

        Note: There are some movies that might have been nominated but were only released in cinemas in 2021, and as of the time of this post do not have a home streaming option. I have immunocompromised people in my family, a child too young to be vaccinated, I’m not an accelerationist, I ain’t famous enough for studios to send me Oscar-esque review copies, and the drive-in experience sucks for air. So these films—notably including the MCU’s Spider-Man: No Way Home—were not considered. Sorry, but global pandemic not sorry. Still, I’m happy with what did make the cut.

        Best Believable

        These movies’ interfaces adhere to solid HCI principles and believable interactions. They engage us in the story world by being convincing. The nominees for Best Believable are Needle in a Timestack, Stowaway, and Swan Song.

        Best Narrative

        These movies’ interfaces blow us away with wonderful visuals and the richness of their future vision. They engross us in the story world by being spectacular. The nominees for Best Narrative are The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Reminiscence, and The Matrix Resurrections.

        Audience choice: Robot

        It could be my bias from working on and teaching about AI, but I noticed a preponderance of interesting robots last year. So for this year there’s a new category of Audience Choice, and that’s for Robot! Look for an upcoming post with a link to vote on your favorite. The candidates are the unnamed bartender from Cosmic Sin (who gets maybe seconds of screen time, but is interesting nonetheless), Jeff from Finch, Eric and Deborahbot 5000 from The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Bubs from Space Sweepers, and Steve from the unsettling Settlers.

        Audience choice: Movie

        All of the movies nominated for other awards will be presented for an Audience Choice award. Watch this space for when the ballot is open. In the meantime, if like me you want to see all the candidates so you can be elated or outraged at results, start watching now.

        Best Interfaces

        The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology. The nominees for Best Interfaces are Oxygen, Space Sweepers, and Voyagers.

        In prior years I’ve done custom edits of the nominees’ interfaces, but those supercuts keep getting yoinked from YouTube despite obvious Fair Use, and I don’t have the time or willpower to fight it, so we’ll all have to make do with trailers (above) that don’t include interfaces plus individual posts with screenshots (coming soon). Thank the IP lawyers for that.

        Winners will be announced near the end of March. And while I don’t have any idea how I’d find a single address to send physical awards to, I’d like to try for that this year.

        As always, please remember that the award looks at the interfaces in the movies rather than the movies overall.

        The Fritzes 2021 Winners

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        The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition. Awards are given for Best Believable, Best Narrative, Audience Choice, and Best Interfaces (overall.) A group of critics and creators were consulted to watch the nominated films, compare their merits, and cast votes.

        As we all know 2020 was a strange year—being the first big year of the COVID pandemic—and cinema was greatly affected. The number of sci-fi films was low, and the amount of interfaces in those films often smallish compared to prior years. But that does not mean they were not without quality, and here I’m happy to celebrate the excellent work of the candidates and the winners.

        Best Believable

        These movies’ interfaces adhere to solid HCI principles and believable interactions. They engage us in the story world by being convincing. The nominees for Best Believable are Minor Premise, Project Power, and Proximity.

        The winner of the Best Believable award for 2021 is Project Power.

        Project Power

        Project Power’s novum is a speculative street drug called Power, that can either explode you, or give you temporary superpowers that are derived from animals’ abilities. Frank Shaver is a policeman who is a user, who has befriended his young dealer, Robin. Art, an ex-soldier who goes by the name Major, teams up with Shaver and Robin, to work their way through the Power dealer network, to stop distribution and find Major’s daughter Tracy, who plays a key role in the whole thing. On the way they learn that Power was created by a private defense contractor, Teleios, that is using New Orleans like a Tuskegee-like testing ground, and work to bring it down.

        The interfaces we see belong to Teleios, and tell a story of surveillance, control, social justice, and cutting-edge genetic engineering. While being cool and reserved, the interfaces are believable and help engage us in its psychotic scheme. It’s a Netflix original, so you can catch the movie there.

        Best Narrative

        These movies’ interfaces blow us away with wonderful visuals and the richness of their future vision. They engross us in the story world by being spectacular. The nominees for Best Narrative are Love and Monsters, Underwater, and World of Tomorrrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime.

        The winner of the Best Narrative award for 2021 is World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime.

        World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime

        In a far and bleakly dystopian future, David Prime is alone in his spaceship, when he discovers a hidden memory from a future lover named Emily 9, that sets him off on a trek to retrieve memories from his multiple, future, cloned selves. The instructions that he needs to follow are all from a technology 400 years in the future, the size of which require that he offload increasingly more and more important “cognitive apps.” David’s glitchy, intrusive-ad-infested head-mounted viewscreen interface tells of a world where genetic engineering is a schlock product “HOLOGRAMS THAT YELL AT YOU! (HOTT WILD DISCRETE PARTYLOVE),” human minds are little more than extended smartphones, time travel is used mostly for murder, and human experience is wholly mediated. See it on Vimeo.

        Audience Choice

        All of the movies nominated for other awards were presented for an Audience Choice award. Across social media, the readership was invited to vote for their favorite, and the results tallied. The winner of the Audience Choice award for 2021 is LX 2048.

        LX 2048

        Adam Bird is dealing with a broken family, a wrecked world, a failing career, and on top of it all, a diagnosis of heart failure. To get a new heart that can be transplanted from a clone, he must approach his estranged wife Reena and ask her to request her Insurance Spouse ahead of his death. She agrees to it but bitterly arranges a virtual assassination for Adam before getting accidentally killed herself. When his clone shows up at his door he must face off against a better version of himself. It’s a dense thriller that goes to ask: What if your dream lover prefers a dream version of you? What if humanity was only a chrysalis?

        The interfaces are simple and often subtle, but tell of a high-tech world trapped by virtual escapism, the complications of technological personhood, and the threat that our creations will obviate us. You can watch LX 2048 on many streaming services.

        Best Interfaces

        The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology. The nominees for Best Narrative are Archive, LX 2048, and The Midnight Sky.

        The winner of the Best Interfaces award for 2021 is Archive.

        Archive

        George is an engineer reactivating a remote, mothballed industrial facility for a corporation called ARM. George is using the facility’s assets to work on general artificial intelligence and a robot housing that would be indistinguishable from human. He is camping on a technology called Archive, which offers its clients interactions with a virtual simulation of deceased persons for up to 200 hours, while the archive lasts. But he’s hiding both how far he’s gotten with his work, and that he’s not building just any human, but specifically that of Jules, his deceased wife. He and his 3 prototypes must try to reactive the facility, keep the corporation in the dark, keep a tech gang called the Otaku at bay, and deal with the dark interpersonal strife of the prototypes—with the resources and time he has left.

        The interfaces are striking in their high-contrast palette, tight grid, and bold typography. The interface style extends throughout the costumes, the sets, and props. The interfaces tell of a setting that is lonely, corporatist, and isolated, and hides a dark secret at the center of it all. You can see Archive on several streaming services.

        Congratulations to all the candidates and the winners. That you for helping advance the art and craft of speculative interfaces in cinema.

        The Fritzes 2021: Audience Choice Voting

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        The form to cast your vote for Audience Choice is at the bottom of this post.

        On or around 25 April 2021, scifiinterfaces.com is announcing awards for interfaces in a 2020 science fiction film. An “Audience Choice” will also be announced, and determined by the results of the poll, below. All films eligible for other awards are nominees for the Audience Choice award. Which one had the interfaces that you just loved the best? You should see the movies in full, but you can see trailers for each of the nominees, presented in alphabetical order, below. Voting will be open until 24 April 2021 at 23:59, Pacific Time.

        Archive

        Love and Monsters

        LX 2048

        The Midnight Sky

        Minor Premise

        Project Power

        Proximity

        Underwater

        World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime

        Of those movies, which do you think had the best over all interfaces? Cast your vote below. To avoid flagrant ballot stuffing, you must have a google account and be logged in to that account to cast your vote.

        Voting will be open until 24 April 2021 at 23:59, Pacific Time.

        Please share this post on your social media to get the vote out! Thanks!

        Fritzes 2021 nominees

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        I’m glad I started the Fritzes in 2019, because in 2020 the movie industry was reeling from the haymaker that was COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2. Without the money of butts in cinema seats, many studios postponed production and releases. So the number of films to consider is notably smaller than in decades beforehand. But this also gave us the opportunity to consider films that are less blockbuster, more small and focused.

        Following are the candidates for the 2021 Fritz awards, recognizing excellence in cinema sci-fi interfaces across the prior year.

        Best Believable

        These movies’ interfaces adhere to solid HCI principles and believable interactions. They engage us in the story world by being convincing. The nominees for Best Believable are Minor Premise, Project Power, and Proximity.

        Best Narrative

        These movies’ interfaces blow us away with wonderful visuals and the richness of their future vision. They engross us in the story world by being spectacular. The nominees for Best Narrative are Love and Monsters, Underwater, and World of Tomorrrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime.

        Best Interfaces

        The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology. The nominees for Best Narrative are Archive, LX 2048, and The Midnight Sky.

        Audience choice

        All of the movies nominated for other awards will be presented for an Audience Choice award. Watch this space for when the ballot is open. In the meantime, if like me you want to see all the candidates so you can be elated or outraged at results, start watching now.

        Awards will be announced near the end of April, probably.

        Fritzes 2021: What else is out there?

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        Last year in January I launched an annual awards program for excellence in cinematic sci-fi interfaces. If you didn’t catch it then, here are the inaugural winners. Then the rest of 2020 happened. A lot of movies were postponed since reasonable audiences were staying out of cinemas during the pandemic.

        I’m still going to do the Fritzes this year, formally announcing nominees on 15 MAR and publishing the results on 25 APR (timed with the Oscars), but this post is asking to see if my readership knows (and can recommend) other movies that I might not have heard about. This is because of the movies I saw last year, only 2 (that’s right, two) had interfaces significant enough to evaluate. And one of those only had 1 interface in it. In total. So maybe you know more?

        2020 sci-fi movies with negligible-or-no interfaces

        Here’s a list of those movies that I watched which had negligible or no interfaces to review. (Note some of these were awful, so this is not a recommendations list, just an accounting.)

        The ones with some interfaces

        Still on my to-watch list

        Here’s the list of sci-fi movies I’m aware of that were released in 2020 that I have yet to watch. Now it could be that I’ve just watched things in an unfortunate order, and the ones I watched happened to be the ones without much to review. Maybe (hopefully?) that’s true. But just in case…

        If you have seen any of these and can share with me that they have no or negligible interfaces (and save the 90ish minutes of time) please let me know that, too.

        The Ask

        So…does anyone know of other 2020 films with great interfaces that I should see? Please let me know on social media or in the comments.

        Television addendum

        In contrast to the suspiciously-interfaceless moviescape, I’ve seen a lot of great interface work in television. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Expanse, Devs, Lovecraft Country, The Mandalorian, Star Trek Discovery, and Star Trek Picard, to name a few. So much great work. Awarding television shows is some complexity I haven’t ventured into yet, but if I wind up with a paucity of examples in film, I might have to start alternating years for TV & movies. Or start up a new set of awards just for TV.

        Star Trek Discovery, S03E05 “Die Trying” screen shot. And yes, I know.

        Fritz 2020: Best Interfaces

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        The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology. The nominees for Best Narrative are I Am Mother, Spider Man: Far From Home, and Men in Black: International.

        The winner of the Best Interfaces award for 2020 is Spider-Man: Far From Home.

        Spider-Man: Far From Home

        In the second 2019 nominee movie from the MCU, Peter Parker fails to have a normal summer studying abroad in Europe. He witnesses what he thinks are elemental monsters wreaking havoc on popular tourist cities, and a new superhero named Mysterio fighting them. Over the course of the film, Parker and his Scoobys discover the terrible truth before defeating and exposing the real bad guy. In the end, Parker learns to accept Tony Stark’s legacy, and then has his secret identity rudely outed.

        Technology is at the very heart of this plot. And while it could have played out with lots of gee-whiz wiggling-chart nonsense, Far from Home puts in the work to make the interfaces believable, germane to the plot, and still pretty amazing. Sensational. Spectacular, even.

        When you watch the film again, keep an eye out for Mysterio’s drone tracking screens, the solid comedy with the trigger-happy AI Edith, and even the lovely suit-design tools that echo Iron Man from over a decade before, and you’ll see why the film is nominated for Best Interfaces of the year.

        You can watch Spider-Man: Far From Home online at Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, and with subscriptions at Hulu and Starz.

        I would love to extend my congratulations to all the studios who produced this work, but Hollywood is complicated and nothing makes it easy to identify exactly who is to credit for what. So let me extend my congratulations generally to the nominees and winners for an extraordinary body of work. Here’s looking to the next year of sci-fi cinema.